Voices within presets

Hey guys,

Wondering if anyone can help me with this idea.

So sometimes in a live set I'll have a song that has a 2 or more voices, eg verses=synth, choruses=mellotron, etc. Currently I use buttons on my MIDI controller to switch between instruments in combinator devices in Reason (for those familiar with the program). As you know with SamplerBox it can take a few seconds when switching between presets, which is fine in between songs but definitely not during.

How would I go about using a new keyword variable (let's say %voice) to the definition.txt to achieve this? In python I would imagine somehow disabling and enabling sample sets depending on which voice button is toggled, but I'm having trouble figuring out where to start...

You can also use another approach as midi offers 128 notes, which is 10 octaves. If you give the samples alternative midi note numbers, it is possible to have 2 to 4 voices in 1 sample. By using the octave buttons on the keyboard you can map it quite fast on the right range=voice.

Ah ok good idea. What if the voice's midinote values are shifted instead?

-When voice is enabled, range is the usual 1-128
-Then disable all other voices by pushing their midinote ranges way out of the way 1000-1128

I know that simply assigning all required samples notes across 1-128 is easier to achieve programmatically, but I'm also thinking about easing the headaches caused when making sample sets ;)

That's the royal way indeed, but it will take some programming :-)
It will also set SB's requirements to PI3 because of the memory usage.

That's in the case that the combined size of the samples might be massive, yeah? In my case, sample sets (or a voice) are rarely larger than 100mb so I wouldn't be worrying about that anyway - but it's definitely something worth bearing in mind

This ended up being as easy as I initially thought - although it still took me half a day to find this solution haha!

Added a new %voice variable to definition.txt. For example,
piano_note%midinote_voicenumber%voice.wav
organ_note%midinote_voicenumber%voice.wav

I've condensed the code to mostly just my additions/modifications. The main thing was adding voice to the samples dictionary (dictionary, right?), and modifying the current_voice variable with MIDI buttons

# ACTUALLY LOAD
...
defaultparams = {'midinote': '0', 'velocity': '127', 'notename': '', 'voice': '1'}
...
.replace(r"\%voice", r"(?P<voice>\d+)")\
...
voice = int(info.get('voice', defaultparams['voice']))
voices.append(voice)
samples[midinote, velocity, voice] = Sound(os.path.join(dirname, fname), midinote, velocity)
...
initial_keys = set(samples.keys())
voices = list(set(voices)) # Remove duplicates by converting to a set
for voice in xrange(len(voices)):
    for midinote in xrange(128):
        lastvelocity = None
        for velocity in xrange(128):
            if (midinote, velocity, voice) not in initial_keys:
...

Some MIDI buttons will change the current_voice variable which determines which samples are active

# MIDI CALLBACK
...
try:
    playingnotes.setdefault(midinote, []).append(samples[midinote, SelectVelocity, current_voice].play(midinote, velocity))
except:
    pass
...

Sustain pedal also works as intended: samples will keep sustaining even after a voice change.

I also discovered that this opens the door to layering samples which for me could be super useful, but I can also think of a handful of potential issues off the top of my head

That's clever! Really neat solution,thanks for sharing.

Some minor things I had to do to get it working:

• "for voice in xrange(len(voices)):" changed to "for voice in voices:"
• all occurrences of samples[] will have to get the extra parameter (obvious of course, but pretty hard to debug if you forget one :-))
• current voice is a global variable