[jmsl] absolute scheduling

[jmsl at music.columbia.edu]

I'm trying to use jmsl to build a sequencing back-end for a  
composition app, but I'm having some real problems. I've based my  
design around ParallelCollection and MusicShape objects, but I'm  
having some troubles with the "duration" paradigm for scheduling  
events in MusicShape. Specifically, I want to have "tracks" with  
"events" at absolute, locked, locations in time. The problem I'm  
having is that, in a track with 4 events (for example), when I delete  
event 2, the MusicShape moves events 3 and 4 back in time, by virtue  
of the way the duration parameter works. I don't want that... If I  
remove an event, I just want to remove that event itself, without  
affecting any of the surrounding events. I could recalculate the  
durations, but that seems way over the top, to me...
It seems like this should be easy, but for some reason I can't wrap my  
head around how this would best be done.

I would be enormously appreciative if somebody could just quickly  
describe the kind of data/object structure I'd best use for this sort  
of sequencer design. I feel like it must still be a  
ParallelCollection, but I'm really not clear about how to populate  
it... At this point, my design uses a set of double[] arrays that  
represent my discrete events, and these events have a dimension for  
"metricPosition", which is an absolute location, in beats, for the  
event.

Any help very much appreciated.

J.