Features for the ultimate looping device

[mhamburg@Adobe.COM (Mark Hamburg)]

Long ago, Kim asked for suggestions for the ultimate looping device...

One thing that would be really nice would be a way to apply effects to the
loop with the knowledge that it is in fact a loop. This is like sticking an
effects device into the feedback portion of the loop but instead of trying
to carefully run the loop through once and dealing with the fact that the
ends of the loop probably wouldn't come out quite right, it would process
the audio content as if it were part of a continuous stream and essentially
apply the effect all at once. I'm thinking, for example, of being able to
hit a button and add 2 seconds of reverb to the loop or add an 1/8th note
echo on the whole loop.

Or if you really want to get aggressive with the UI and the processing
power required, imagine that instead of doing one-shot processing, you
would hit a button and start processing the loop with continuous
controllers altering the effect applied to the original loop data. When
happy, you'd hit another button and replace the loop with that content.

And, of course, it would be undoable.

If you're a Photoshop user, its like applying a filter to the image with
the added element that when looking for neighboring values, the image data
is just assumed to repeat like a tiled texture.

Speaking of Photoshop like things, I haven't gotten myself an EDP yet, so I
don't know whether it does something like this, but Photoshop 5's snapshot
feature suggests that it would be really nice to be able to take the
current loop and save it off as a snapshot that you can come back to. Thus,
you could do something like the following:

1. Record your initial loop.
2. Save that off as snapshot 1.
3. Further modify, augment, mutilate the loop.
4. Save that off as snapshot 2.
5. Switch back to snapshot 1.
6. Mess around some more.
7. Save that as snapshot 3.
8. Switch back to snapshot 2.

etc.

I think the EDP may sort of allow this by copying from one loop to another,
but that takes a certain amount of advance planning. It's proven to be
really cool in Photoshop to wander down a path and then be able to decide
"oh, this is interesting" let me save this as a useful point from which to
work and have it become inviolate unless you specifically decide to update
it. (Actually, Photoshop makes it too hard to update snapshots.)

One interface for this might be to organize the unit as a work loop and a
bunch of buffers with a button per buffer. Press the button quickly and the
buffer gets loaded into the work buffer. Press and hold and the work buffer
overwrites the other buffer. (Include undo support if you're really
aggressive.)

For audio cleanliness, it would probably be nice to be able to fade between
loops. Of course, that fast takes us into the multiple loops at once issue.
And then you start wanting to save off midpoints in the fade as loops in
their own right and...

(Hmmm. If I were better at hardware, I think I've just hit on an
interesting home project from the software side. Unfortunately, hardware is
not my forte.)

Mark