Varisample

[Antimon]

Was idly browsing through stuff bundled with Live yesterday, when I came across a sample called "Drum Machines 909", which seemed to be a bunch of similar samples in a single .aif file, playing one after each other. I immediately thought of how I've tried recording banging on a can or an egg or something, and then stored it in a single file so that I could choose which of the samples that I wanted or liked when I used them later - it's such a pain to record many samples one by one, storing them in separate files.

It isn't that easy... the interfaces for scrolling through a sample like that a often cumbersome. I've had some success on an ESX, but when the files get bigger the start position knobs are a bit too low resolution.

A couple of minutes later it struck me - I have this ChucK thing, that is a programming language. Those are pretty good at doing stuff automatically, and ChucK is really good at audio. Why don't I just make an app that looks through a sample, finds all of the hits and lets me play them in some easy fashion.

So I wrote this Varisample thing. It's a class containing a LiSa that is loaded with a sample file, and some functions for playing the different variations. I've included some documentation at the top of the file. I'm including a little package with some test code and recordings of me clapping and banging on two different cans - run "test_varisample.ck" to listen to it. It isn't the greatest demo, but I think it sounds a little bit more lively than static, single samples.

I have a hunch that this is done in Ableton somewhere (since I found that file), but I can't guess where. Anyway, what do you think? Useful?

Stuff left to do: sounds with slow attack cut in too sharply because of the simple threshold algorithm I use when looking for sound. Any thoughts on a better (but still simple enough) way? Also, I wanted to pan sounds when using multiple voices, but there is no pan function per voice in LiSa. What's the easiest way to do that - I am guessing that I need two LiSas, one for left and one for right.

/Stefan

Edit: new version of the Varisample class and a second test bundle

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Varisample test.zip
Description:	Varisample test bundle	Download (listen)
Filename:	Varisample test.zip
Filesize:	2.05 MB
Downloaded:	426 Time(s)

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Varisample.ck
Description:	Varisample class version 2, with docs	Download (listen)
Filename:	Varisample.ck
Filesize:	6.38 KB
Downloaded:	471 Time(s)

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Varisample test2.zip
Description:	Better demonstrates the sound variations	Download (listen)
Filename:	Varisample test2.zip
Filesize:	1.55 MB
Downloaded:	422 Time(s)

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[Antimon]

Should I detect the lack of responses as this is tired old thing that everyone knew about, or does the code not work?

Anyway, I fixed the attack thingie, and attached a new bundle that better demonstrates the variation in sound.

/Stefan

[rogan]

The lack of response for me is being busy, but I plan to check this out when things calm down. Finding attacks on the fly is *very* interesting and, I would guess, a very challenging problem in general.

[Antimon]

OK, thanks for saying something It has been a bit quiet here in the forums lately.

I think the attack detector could probably be perfected a bit more, and maybe needs to be tweaked for some samples, but my own tests were pretty satisfactory.

/Stefan