HOLD VALUE (JOV) 🫴🏽

HOLD VALUE (JOV) 🫴🏽 is a sample-and-hold: while it's engaged, it freezes on the last value it received and keeps sending that, ignoring everything new that arrives. Let go, and it passes fresh values through again. It's the node you'd use to latch a random seed, freeze a parameter mid-animation, or "pin" whatever a live input was doing at the moment you hit a button. Think of it as a pause button for data.

The bad news first: this is a pre-2.0 Jovimetrix node, and it didn't survive the 2.0 rework. Current Jovimetrix doesn't ship a same-named replacement, so if this page is where you landed after a workflow broke, that's the story - the README's "don't update past 1.7.48" warning is exactly about nodes like this one. The closest things in the modern pack are different ideas: DELAY (JOV) ✋🏽 postpones execution for a duration, but it doesn't hold a value against new arrivals. If you genuinely need sample-and-hold today, the practical options are a small custom node, or latching logic built from a COMPARISON (JOV) gate, or the frontend's own workflow controls.

How it worked

The inputs were minimal and honest:

• 📥 - the value to hold (any type; it was a passthrough).
• ✋🏽 - the engage switch. Off: the node passes 📥 through untouched. On: the node outputs the last value it saw before being engaged and stops updating, even as new values arrive on 📥.

Output was a single 🚌 (any type), so whatever you fed it - float, seed, image, string - came back out frozen. The whole thing was a boolean gate around a latch.

Where the old node would trip people up: it held per instance, not per value stream. Flip the switch, and every value on that wire froze at the same moment, which is exactly right for a seed but a surprise if you expected only one channel to latch.

Installing it

It ships in Jovimetrix (in the versions that still have it):

# ComfyUI Manager: search "Jovimetrix" and install
cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Amorano/Jovimetrix.git
cd Jovimetrix
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart ComfyUI. And again: if you're on this page because the node vanished, you've updated past the 1.7.48 line. You can pin the old version, but for new work the better move is to re-implement the latch with current nodes.

Troubleshooting

• Node won't load after an update - expected; it's legacy. Either roll the pack back or rebuild the latch.
• Value doesn't freeze when you flip the switch - a classic misread: the switch engages the hold, so it freezes the last value that arrived before you flipped it. If you flip it and then send a new value, that new one won't come through - that's the feature.

Honest take: sample-and-hold is a genuinely useful idea that few ComfyUI workflows bother with, and this node was a clean little implementation of it. It's a shame it didn't carry into 2.x, but the concept is simple enough to rebuild anywhere.