Not likely. You may have an encoder triggering an interrupt, but the ISR does not run on the encoder.
My mistake, yes you are correct it's using interrupts.
What, exactly, needs to be reset? Some count that the ISR is incrementing?
Basically I have audio tracks in PD that are chosen by fiduscial markers. I then have a hand crank attached to the encoder that effects the speed of the track. So when a track is changed by replacing the fiduscial the encoder values need to be reset back to zero so the process can once again repeat itself.
You also seem to be having trouble expressing yourself. I don't see where having an ISR handle input from an encoder is any kind of "workaround". That is how an encoder is generally used.
I'm having trouble sending out secondary values along with the pulse data that I can use in the other programs and I can't find any examples that I can work with that would enable me to do so or if its possible (we only begun working with Arduino last semester). The fiduscial markers are the workaround I'm referring to, I was originally going to handle choosing the tracks to play in pd by using the arduino to do so (e.g button presses, rfid).
Which you haven't described.
I hope to eventually work with the encoder using the speed at which the crank is spun at rather than the pulses, by counting the pulses per second. This will speed in the audio in PD until users find a "sweet spot" at which the track will maintain it's normal rate of play. I need to sort out communication between the 3 programs first so I can then focus on the encoder as I already have it communicating to PD through processing but not back the other way and I am currently using the pulse count to effect song speed. I then plan on having this drive a motor according to the speed also. This motor will then spin a record and will be placed inside an old gramophone to act as the user interface and hopefully drive the motor in the opposite direction using a h-bridge and the negative pulses. I didn't want to post in the wrong forum that's why I didn't fully describe my project and the concept of the project had to be developed before we even got a chance to investigate whether it was feasible or not, hence my lack of technical knowledge of the encoder.