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Looper's Delight
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[jeff] >> Basically loops are cut up into multiple "slices" >> ... >> To change the tempo, the playback software shifts each slice closer >> together (to speed up) or farther apart (to slow down). [andy] > Sounds like a fantastic feature to put in a looper. I actually experimented with this a little when I was working on Shuffle (slicing the loop into even sections and randomizing their order). After slicing, rather than changing the order it just changed the start times so they could expand and contract. I didn't find this particularly interesting, expansion left gaps of silence between slices, contraction made them overlap which produced various phasey artifacts. It was kind fun for glitch looping but didn't achieve what most would consider a musical time stretch. The main problem was that the slices were way to coarse (8thsPerCycle) and did not attempt to find the beats. It wouldn't be horribly complicated to do proper beat slicing, but I think you'd still have to be careful about what you play so that the automatic beat detector can make the right choices. Doing this in real time would be the challenge. You would probably have to enter a BeatSlice mode for a second during which the analysis takes place in parallel with playing the loop and no other modifications are allowed. Then something lights up to let you know you can twist the expand/contract knob. Allowing continuous control over this also doesn't fit well with the infinite layer model. While you are in "twist the tempo knob" mode you would not be allowed to make any other changes, the track becomes more of a static-loop-playback-with-effects track rather than a continuously-evolving-loop track. As soon as you start overdubbing or otherwise modifying a sliced loop that would effectively pin the slices to their current locations and we would use that as the background for the next layer. You could repeat this process after the next overdub if desired. [per] > And, as the third stage, loop slices are mapped to MIDI notes > according to the GM standard (Roland's General MIDI standard, which goes > Note#36=Kick drum, Note#37=Rim Shit, Note#38=Snare drum one, etc > etc). Given all of the above, this would be fairly easy. It would be sort of like SamplerStyle=Once except that you would be triggering and playing only a subcycle rather than the entire loop. Where it would differ is that you probably want to trigger more than one slice at the same time. Like the tempo knob, this would only be available in "static loop" mode, as soon as you start modifying the loop the slices are gone and you can't trigger them. You could however use Bounce to record a performance of triggered slices into another track, then build from there. Or I could just fix my backlog of bugs :-) Sigh, too much to do... Jeff