On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 06:19:05AM -0500, Bill Allen
wrote:
fons adriaensen wrote:
AMS should handle multiple patches without
requiring a separate instance
for each.
That would be great, as ams is my favorite synth, but I haven't found a
way to do it. When you say "should" are you saying that I should be able
to find a way, or that somebody should be able to add the capability to it?
I think it is possible to have two ore more independent patches in monophonic
mode, but not if poly > 1. It's some time since I worked on AMS so I could be
wrong.
There are (again) several issues involved.
- AMS has no means to load a second patch while preserving the current one.
So you can't combine two existing patches without having to manually recreate
at least one of them.
- IIRC there are some global variables involved in the hidden communication
from ENV generators back to the voice assignment logic in the MIDI
controllers. Having two or more really independent patches would require
these to be eliminated, and replaced by an explicit path.
- The 'poly' setting is also global, but it should be independent in each
patch.
I made some plans more than a year ago to fix all of this, but it would be
a major and very invasive operation. Another factor blocking this was that
these changes would probably render some existing patches incompatible, and
Matthias didn't like that very much.
I still hope to return to AMS some day, and when I do it will be a major
reworking of almost everything. So if AMS is your favorite synth I'd like
to know
- which features are absolutely essential and should not change,
- which ones are important but maybe could be done slightly
differently,
- what can be sacrified in order to make other things possible ?
--
FA
Not getting into your three questions yet - couldn't the problem at hand
(multiple patches) be solved by adding a midi channel selector to the
MCV module? In other words, if I create a patch with two MCV modules,
they both take my midi notes from the same channel. If you could assign
a channel to each MCV, then the network that you set up from one would
be controlled separately from the other. Thus you essentially have a
single multiple voice patch instead of having separate patches each with
its own voice. That would be fine with me.
Regards,
Bill