sampler

[ben]

I've been thinking about the sampler machine / wavetable. I don't know
what your plans are for this, but I have a few ideas.  I like how
Impulse Tracker handles instruments, so my idea is similar to that.

There could be a global wavetable, with each entry having the
visible parameters 

[<index> <name> <filename> <middle-c rate>]

and whatever else would be necessary internally.  Keeping the samples in
external files would make saving songs more efficient and editing easier.

Each instrument could be a machine.  It could use only one sample across
the entire range of notes, but would allow the possibility of
arbitrarily assigning samples to notes / note ranges.  It would have
volume and pan envelopes (and maybe a filter envelope), NNAs (new note
actions - to choose between note off and sustain when a new note occurs)
global volume control (independent of the normal volume parameter), and
global tuning.  Also, it would be neat for the sample looping parameters
to be in the instruments instead of in the wavetable, to allow dynamic
manipulation.

Polyphony-aware portamento would be nice - you could at any time send a
parameter along with a note that would tell the instrument to slide the
pitch of the most recent note to that of the new note.  Oh, and a second
mode that would leave the old note intact, but slide the new note from
the pitch of the old note.  Maybe most of that could be handled by the
host's channel allocation.

Another cool thing would be the ability to assign an aux input as the
controller for any parameter, so you could do things like messing around
with the instrument's global tuning in the song.

Again, I'm not sure what you have in mind for this.. just some ideas,
for whatever they're worth.

-ben