Oy, sorry for flooding the board, but need to get this off my chest 
…
I often use the fade-out button in the sample editor on beat synced breaks using different snap settings to get a tight feel, emphasize certain hits and/or impose offbeat volume effects to contrast rhythm.
Would be nice if these overall snapped volume edits over a complete sample could be remembered in some kind of preset mechanism. Presets that you could recall on other samples to enforce amplitude changes on. For example, apply the fades you used on a drumbreak, on a static drone or pad sample. It would be an ‘offline’, more crude version of the signal follower.
A more general option would be simply dividing a sample in N ‘slices’, and have every snap faded out for gating effects, or do arpeggio kind of alternations between fade-out/fade-in, fade-out/crossfade/fade-in/reverse etc etc (This could maybe be incorporated in the beatslicer tool?).
By using a volume envelope shape in the automation editor you can achieve similar results, but it takes time setting up (doubling the patternlength, speed for resolution increase then rendering the volume into a new sample) and isn’t practical enough imo.
If only we could apply the shape drawn in the automation editor directly to the processing functions in the sample editor!
Would open up more gradual fades and would be awesome if also influencing the mix-value of the FX-button over the selection for example.
Grts,
R