An object I haven’t used very much is the qmetro object in Max 4.5. It’s a great object though – as pointed out to me by David Zicarelli recently. Essentially it is like a metro object, but passes its bangs out only in the low-priority thread.

The benefit is when polling something that is driving the user interface. The user interface is only drawn at low-priority anyway, so the qmetro object cuts down the CPU used when compared to a patch driven my a regular old metro object. As an example, if an analysis is being used solely to drive visual feedback, then it makes sense to drive the analysis with a qmetro instead of a metro.