All this recent talk about turning off the interpolation for samples and output have made me wonder why automation is still entirely tick based.
I doubt there are many people out there who would say they need more resolution than per-line (or even per-tick) for placing of automation points, but believe almost everyobdy can see the advantage that could be gained by having the automation more continuous (ie a smoother transition between points.)
I was wondering if something very similar to the interpolation used for samples could be used for this? It obviously would not need to use such high rates, and a lower resolution as well. Assuming samples work in 48kHz and 16bits, and midi you could probably get away with using a sample rate of 1/16 of this, and isn’t bit depth of midi/automation 8 bits. This gives 3kHz at 8 bits. Lets take a tempo of 180bpm, this gives 3 beats per second, and thus 1000 points per beat (why have I got 996ppn going through my head for most ‘professional’ sequencers?) which is more than enough I would of though. Also, theoretically, you could have 32 of these processed in the same amount of CPU cycles it takes to interpolate one sample, so you can’t claim it would be that high a drain on the CPU.
This also brings me onto a thing I noticed when I first started using Renoise. Think it was actually my first ever track written using it. I will try and upload a could of example samples in the near future, but at the moment I will try and just explain in words:
In this track I have a filter and a glitch-type effect working on a track. Song is written in speed6 and this gave it a very nice, almost talking, effect as the automation would jump to the new points on the lines. Later in this track I wanted to do a time stretch effect using the 09xx command, but at speed6 it really wasn’t high enough resolution so I switched to speed3 and expanded all patterns. Once I had done this the effect I mentioned earlier sounded horrible, far far too fast and just really didn’t work as I would like.
Something which would be nice would be to be able to set the resolution for automation envolopes, even if this is via a function that changes the display from line to point, inserting them on every crossing (or removing every alternate one if you go to even less resolution.)
Right, I feel like I’ve written a whole essay now, Bit like being back at school really, anybody else have any thoughts or feelings on this?