RE: [Linuxsampler-devel] Hi - Very quiet list - my first post

[Mark K. <mk...@co...>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: lin...@li...
> [mailto:lin...@li...]On Behalf Of
> David Olofson
> Sent: Monday, January 20, 2003 3:06 PM
> To: lin...@li...
> Subject: Re: [Linuxsampler-devel] Hi - Very quiet list - my first post
>
> > My focus (in this specific conversation) really initiated from
> > the idea that linux would benefit from have a simple app that
> > starts from a base of audio samples, as opposed to a synth of some
> > type, and knows enough about MIDI, envelopes and processing to be
> > interesting and useful.
>
> I see. Reading your other post, it seems like most of what you've
> mentioned is either implemented or high on the TODO list for
> Audiality (obviously, since I'm actually going to *use* this myself
> :-) - but I don't know when I'll get around to hack some form of GUI.
> It's not a top priority for me, since creating sounds from scratch is
> workable with a text editor, and loading WAVs is one trivial line of
> script per file.

The value of GUI's early is marketing, and I don't think that's important
right now.

I actually do agree and believe that there's a lot value starting with good
scripts and testing the features BEFORE you invest in a GUI. Let's go after
that first. I'll go look more at what's there in Audiality. My initial worry
was that it was a sequencer, and wanted to be a master and not an
instrument. If it can respond to external MIDI, then it looks like it's got
many of the other interesting things today.

I'm not clear about whether you, David, see this as a linux-sampler project.
I did, but it doesn't matter to me. Give me some instructions and scripts
and either way I'll go test it. However, I think there is value in having a
linux-sampler project at this scale. Something that could be put together
rather quickly, tested pretty easily, to get more people interested in the
whole program overall. With small samples it would run out of memory, but
with larger samples it would have to stream from disk. Getting to the point
where we could do that would be cool. I also think it would help ring out
bugs in the engine.

As GUI's go I think that Battery's is pretty straight forward. They have
something like 50 boxes on the screen. Each box corresponds to a specific
MIDI note and channel. You just load a sound in each box and go. Each box in
Battery has an ADSR, some plugin capabilities and other things, but to start
we just make a matrix of 5x10 or so, load some wave files and go. That would
be a useful device unto itself. The rest could come later when we've seen
the underlying sample playback engine working.

To clarify a couple of things:

1) It's a Jack app
2) It really should handle stereo wave files for samples from day 1
3) Should either have a hard audio panner built into each box, or better
yet, respond to MIDI panning, volume and velocity events. Don't bother with
multiple samples per box (velocity chooses them) until we've seen it run.

I completely believe this could be script driven in the beginning, and
possibly stays that way under the hood even longer term.