One of the sampling features I miss most in Redux and Renoise is being able to adjust the start (and end, and loop point) positions accurately and nondestructively.
Current options:
A. Use the little keyboard icon toggle button in the sample editor to use the edit cursor for sample previewing. This works well when I have a sample that I want to find a better start position to use, and then commit it permanently to the sample by trimming off the beginning. This doesn’t work dynamically in a song, as it’s a destructive operation affecting the sample once committed.
B. Use slice markers. While editing the slices, this restricts the sliced samples to single keys in the key mapping, and disables repitching. Which makes sense, since that’s what it’s meant for. You can commit the slices and then go back afterwards to map them back chromatically, but committing the slices also crops down the end points. The slice markers can’t be adjusted with modulation or FX commands. If you use a phrase, you can leave the slices nondestructive and set the slice and pitch directly in the phrase without having to map the slice to more notes on the keyboard, but I think this only works in phrases.
C. Use SXX FX commands. This only adjusts the start position, and is limited to 256 steps. 256 is pretty good for doing chop-style and glitch/IDM-style edits, or if you’ve got a sample whose number of interesting start positions are a power of 2. It doesn’t have enough granularity for finding a perfect start position in a sample of arbitrary size, and requires repeating the SXX command every time. (Using a phrase to automatically have the SXX command doesn’t work if you’re already sequencing in a phrase.)
D. Duplicate the sample a bunch of times with different start and end and loop points as needed. This works, but it can make a mess and it’s hard to experiment with in a pattern on the fly. This is what I currently do in Redux and Renoise. It doesn’t work for the Swedish House Mafia and Anyma looping tricks, since you can’t continuously adjust the positions over time.
Am I missing any? Let me know, if I am.
Solution? I don’t know. Most DAW-style samplers are based around the idea of replicating a hardware rack sampler, where the sample data is usually a precious read-only resource, and you use nondestructive things like start and end positions to avoid editing the original sample data.
Renoise currently doesn’t have start sample or end sample position things, as far as I know.
