Long sample player

[Atakbabajag]

Hello, I wanted to build a sample player. But those that last e.g. 40 minutes. To this I want to add effects. Can Axoloti do it?

[hitachii]

You want to play a 40 minute sample with effects? I think Johannes says in another thread that using the wave/play object you can theoretically play a sample the length of the storage on the SD card but someone should correct me on that if I'm wrong. If I'm right though, you can continue to add standard effects like reverb, delay, chorus, etc. to the output, sure.

There are a couple ways of playing back samples on the Axoloti, each with their advantages and disadvantages. The wave play object just uses the Axoloti as a media player of sorts. You can't actively manipulate the sample itself like play it in reverse at the 20 minute mark with just a wave play object. That's where things like tables come in, (which is the other primary way of playing back samples, and can do a TON more than just that). Tables hold the sample in either the RAM or SDRAM memory, so you're limited to the amount of time you can hold a file in there, which is much less than 40 minutes.

By combining wave/play and table based objects like delays, or objects like Factotum and Rockafella, you can get pretty far with adding effects. At that point, your only limitation is RAM and SDRAM, which has a fairly generous ceiling on the Axoloti in my opinion.

Oh and if I'm wrong about the SD card-length wave/play playback, you could always just plug external audio straight into the audio input of the Axoloti since the two operate so similarly anyway.

[jaffasplaffa]

As @hitachii says there are different ways of playing back samples.

Using Axo as a media player, for simple file playback, where you don't want to edit the file playback in any way, can play really long files.

But the second you start to want to edit the playback of files, like for example pitching it up and down, you enter a whole new world. The variable types used in Axoloti can not playback files longer than around 1 min and 30 seconds, once you get over that time amount the phasor you use to read the table will loose precision and it will not sound good. This is the same in Pure Data. Pure Data is 32 bit internal processing, which has the same limits. We need 64 bit data to be able to play back long files and also be able to manipulate the sound at the same time.

Here is Katjaas fine explanation about this issue:

But there are work around for something like this, but it's a bit more complicated. You can basically set the phasor to play back a part of the sound with in the range of what sounds good and then add an onset to the table read.

If you are familiar with Pure Data, you can check the example called "B16.long-varispeed" for an example of how to do this.

Anyway, this is a pretty deep topic........... So much to learn and understand