[LAU] Two questions about mono/polyphonic behaviours

[James Morris]

Hi,

I want to ask what behaviours users expect to hear regarding the voice
operations of monophonic and polyphonic synths/samplers. I need to get
a good understanding and my limited experience with real
synths/samplers isn't helping much when it comes to getting the
concepts/behaviours straight enough in my head to get down to coding them.

---

1) Monophonic

in the event a note is playing and a new note is played, would you expect

a) the envelope release stage of the old note to continue while the
new note plays?
b) the old note to cut and the new note play?

2) Polyphonic - This is in terms of a sampler whose playback mode is
'Singleshot' where the sample is played back in full regardless of
note-off events. Would you expect the retriggering of the same note
within time < sample-duration to cause:

a) a second instance of the sample to play back simultaneously (albeit
beginning and ending later in time) without affecting the first?
b) playback of the first instance to stop before being retriggered as
the second (if we're going to talk about first and second)?

---

I would expect to be able to have a choice between a and b in both
questions 1 and 2 above. But do general users? Should I expect them to
go through the same confusion I have to learn the subtle differences
(subtle to untrained ears at least).

The program in question is Petri-Foo. I made comparisons between it
and Specimen and found differences. I'm trying to settles these. I
arrived at the conclusion there could be a fourth voice mode as the
polyphony behaviour in Petri-Foo/Specimen is that of 2a above but 2b
makes more sense in terms of real instruments.

I looked also at Phasex which has a multitude of monophonic and
polyphonic modes (of which MonoMulti is particularly interesting) but
I was unable to identify differences between some of them.

Thanks,
James.