I had this idea to sync the repeater to an LFO, just to see what would come of it.
Check the example XRNS – theoretically, every repeat ought to sound identical, but they don’t.
By about line 64 it gets quieter on its own - Dragging the hydra as the pattern plays puts the LFO and repeater very obviously out of sync
Ticks-per-line (ticks per repetition, even?) makes a lot of difference to the timing, so my hunch is that the LFO isn’t as accurate as the repeater, and that the repeater doesn’t change the time-until-next-repetition until the current repetition is complete.
Checked out your example. I don’t really experience a noticeable drop in volume anywhere, but I do notice small variations in the attack of the kick, where the high resonance from the LFO’ed filter is hitting the sound in a slightly different way sometimes. I also didn’t notice any major problems when repositioning the Hydra.
But I do see what’s happening here anyway… (This is a pretty extreme example to be testing with btw, haha)
We simply have two different systems and timing methods working side by side here, and there is a very small amount of ‘drift’ being introduced over longer periods of time.
The Repeater is obviously processing audio, so it’s running in “audio time”. In other words, its output is sample-accurate. If the length of a repeat happens to be 12345 samples, then it will repeat precisely every 12345 samples. Maybe those repeats will line up perfectly with a pattern line or a tick, maybe they won’t. More often than not they won’t. The Repeater itself doesn’t really care about pattern lines or ticks - it will simply grab those 12345 samples of audio and continue to loop them until you tell it to stop. So if you start repeating a chunk of audio and just leave it running like this over a long period of time, then you’ll potentially experience a bit of drift in relation to the pattern.
The meta devices are running in what we refer to as “event time”. Their output is scheduled and timed in a slightly different way, and is also dependent on your TPL setting. They are designed to stay synced as tightly as possible to the pattern and other events, but due to their nature there will inevitably be some tiny fluctuations in their output. In the grand scheme of things you would probably never even notice or care about such things, but when you get down to the very lowest level there will be variances to deal with - one extra sample here, one less sample there, etc. I believe this is what you’re experiencing in your example - the LFO reset simply isn’t hitting at precisely the same time as each repeat.
Yes, they are there. However, as far as I can see, neither of those two parameters is the equivalent of “replay the current buffer from the beginning NOW”.
