[LAD] Selectable limit for polyphony of virtual synth

[Ralf Mardorf]

Fons Adriaensen wrote:
> Or some _explicit_ feedback from somewhere downstream the patch
> telling the voice allocator that a particular voice has decayed
> far enough to be a candidate for re-use. My exploratory designs
> for AMS II (gathering dust since four years) did exactly that.

This "was" a very good mechanism at the times when the first synth were 
able to play different sounds for different MIDI channels, but tone 
generators were to expensive, because of technical limits, in the 80ies 
there were no DSP chips, 4MB RAM were very expensive :D etc., I still 
have got a 40 MB hard disk, that was more expensive than the complete 
dual core PC I've today. It's easy to understand that your AMS II is 
gathering dust :). I had to dust my Oberheim ;). It would be suspect if 
somebody would write to the list, that e.g his Linux synth don't have 
enough voices. I often wonder why a lot of  synth emulation don't sound 
as good as the original synth, even if comparing a held note sounds 
identical to an original synth. They differ in their behaviour, when 
playing a song, but not by comparing single held notes. To limit the 
polyphony today seems to be more important for some usage, than thinking 
about not having enough voices :).

Cheers,
Ralf