Re: Let's play a game- it's called Imagine The Perfect Looper

["nick ingvoldstad" <nickingvoldstad@gmail.com>]

Well I've made some decisions on this, and have tried to include much of what came up often.  As far as computer connectivity, I'm considering USB 1.0 if it proves to be more reliable, regardless of its relative sluggishness to its more buggy counterpart.  I know Firewire is best, but not as many people have that so I feel it might isolate users.  If I were planning to offer real-time modulation FX, I would need something speedy to beat my sampling rate but that's not the case at the moment; I may not be adding any modulation to the machine at all, for the sake of simplicity.  But I plan to make it easy to add any of your own FX on any individual looping track.  

I know I haven't mentioned any means of actual implementation here, but that's because at this stage in the design, it should all be conceptual and means of actualization would be considered based on the model once it's finalized.  Sorry about the ambiguity though.  For what I have, it will probably be easiest and cheapest to write software to sample and perform everything, then embed into a machine if I want a hardware interface, which I think I do.  So I will have to start coding this from scratch, I suppose.  Yeeeesh!  Might be easiest to write in C# or C, using something like FSound to communicate with my sound card.  I could use my USB soundcard to act as my first 1/4" input, and see if I can get it to sample that.  Once I do, I'll start writing something to loop it etc continuing from there.  When necessary, I could give myself more USB soundcards for modeling a multi-input device.  That will probably be when it gets insanely complicated.  

I am beginning to understand how great an undertaking this would be to take through all the stages of the design process, but remain determined as it will probably force me to prim functions and minimize my design, hopefully without compromising any freedom for the user.  Having looked into many of my respondents, I see what experience you all have, like Bob and Jeff having designed the Looperlative and Mobius.  You guys are like rock stars of the looping world! @_@  Bob, you should know that having researched the LP-1 as one of the high-end loopers I presented on, I'm very impressed and have great respect for your work.  I found my favorite parts about it were the 8 independently adjustable tracks and especially the ethernet connectivity.  A software implementation makes it much easier to update the product, fixing bugs and offering new features and updates.  But the ethernet connectivity allows you that with hardware... pretty genius.  By the way, I happened to meet a man who when this project came up in conversation,
mentioned that he somehow knows a guy on the Looperlative team, Steve Lawson. 
Small world!  I'll have to get ask again how exactly he knows him.  His name is Brandon, and he's visiting my town from
around Manchester.  

"You may find that some of your more time critical routines may need to be written in C or even assembly code. "

I suppose the function most dependent upon timeliness would be the sampling itself.  I've done some PIC assembly coding, so if it comes down to that I might at least have a little bit of experience, but I think my microprocessor design course next semester will be a big help for this.  If you guys think it'd be best to do the whole thing in C, I'll take your advice... that's what I'll be using the most in school next semester.  

Nick Ingvoldstad

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 7:41 PM, E Gross <slapbandjam@yahoo.com> wrote:

I am a newbie looper, the nicest thing for me would be on the fly pitch transposition.