Man I missed a discussion. Sucks not having a net connection at home. First and Foremost. Pete, please keep on doing whatever the hell it is you want to do. It was great getting in this morning and having a freshmeat announcement with an update of specimen. This mail is not a feature wish list for specimen (or for anyones sampler) this is just what I like sampler wise. Second Samplers. Like many people on this list I had been using hardware boxes for years. In the end, the last 2 pieces of gear I gave up were my SY99 and my Yamaha A3000. I gave both of these up solely because of Native Instruments Kontakt (sampler) and FM7 (fm synth). Up to that point I had been using the outboard gear and PD. Native Instruments showed me the light. (subsequently I have built an FM7 clone in PD, and I am slowly working on a Kontakt clone, but one of my favorite sound manglers (the multi breakpoint envelopes, are pretty impossible to do in pd from a GUI standpoint and tough to understand from a shear command driven list of numbers standpoint) Things Kontakt did that made me want to switch. 1. Easy of importing a bunch of samples at a time (or if you have a GUI use it right). You could drag a sample onto the keyboard window. It would map the root to the key you dragged it to. You could then pull out the borders of the key (left and right set range, up and down set velocity). Samples could be dragged over each other, and you could set cross fade between the overlapping samples. I was sold the day I needed t0 import a couple of hundred chopped up bits of sound. It took me 5 minutes to set up 2 sound banks in Kontakt, I gave up after about 3 hours on the a3k. 2. Modulation sources and Destinations coming out my ears. Modulator can be tempo (midi time clock) synched. Pretty much every parameter can be modulated (even ones most people wouldn't want to modulate). You can even modulate the parameters of the modulators with more modulations, its very GNU. LFOs with sine, tri, square, saw, random and multi waveforms (optional tempo-sync with definable quantize times) Envelopes: AHDSR as well as 32-stage flexible envelopes Envelope follower 32-stage step modulator Glide/portamento Velocity Release velocity Key position MIDI controller # (numbers freely assignable) Pitchbend Poly aftertouch Mono aftertouch To me these are the 2 most import aspects of a sampler (the fundamentals have to be there, like multi-sample playback, loop start and end points, Pitch and Amplitude control, not just envelopes but coarse and fine adjustments, allow me to assign my envelopes to all of these. Having an internal Filter is debatable, but if you are going to put it in there make sure I can modulate that to! I don't want a sample editor, not even normalize or other common DSP stuff). It made sense to have it built in back when that sampler in the rack was the only thing that understood samples. But now I have resound, and audacity, and snd, and etc etc etc. I guess now that I am thinking about it, one thing Linux people could (and do) do in many cases is to give me complete access to all of this stuff from the command line. It would be a wicked ass command but if I could set up a complex instrument with a script, and then play it without a GUI, ohhh I am drooling thinking about the weird stuff I could force a sampler do. m. _________________________________________________ Scanned on 23 Feb 2004 20:00:59 Scanning by http://erado.com