I was going to send a feature request to Rui Capela author of drumkv1
(and of course, Qtractor!), but I wondered if anyone else would also
like this.
It'd be nice if drumkv1 supported optional Jack outputs per instrument,
selectable with a toggle at the instrument level. The reason is as
follows:
Normally if you want sampled drums on Linux, you have three main
choices. You can go with Hydrogen, which has multiple outputs per
instrument, but it's a big thick program with a sequencer that's
currently not as powerful as Muse or Seq24 (or just about anything).
The plus side: Hydrogen lets you tweak the parameters of your
instruments in-program from the GUI, for pitch, ADSR, etc.
Or you can create a SoundFont and run FluidSynth. This too has multiple
outputs, but you can't do much tweaking at the instrument level once
you've created it in Swami and saved it. Your SoundFont pretty much
becomes a "rompler" for computers.
Or you can run drumkv1...which has more flexibility in changing the
sound of your instruments than even Hydrogen, will let you use whatever
powerful sequencer you want to drive it...but doesn't do multiple
outputs. Doh!
Basically, if drumkv1 could create per instrument outputs, you'd have it
all. I often like to send drum sounds back to my hardware mixer for
more processing in the phsyical world, then record again as another
track.
Also, the problem with the way Hydrogen does this is that it's either
completely on or completely off -- if you turn on the toggle in Hydrogen
for instrument outs, every single instrument in your drumset gets its
own Jack output whether you want it or not. Also, even the mono samples
get a left and a right stereo out. Usually it's overkill, because I'm
usually not taking every single output to the mixer for processing. I
don't know if having all those outputs on every instrument adds any
extra work for the computer or Jack to do, but it does at the very least
make Hydrogen show up in QJackCtl with a list of outputs that goes on
forever. Usually I just want six or seven at most!
It'd be nice if on each instrument in drumkv1 had a toggle that says
you'd like to have a Jack output just for that sound. If it's a mono
sound, it could be a single mono output. If you want to turn that on
for every sound in a 30-instrument drumkit, you could...but you probably
won't...so this way it doesn't waste resources giving you more jacks
than you're actually needing.
I wondered if there were any comments on this. Also, I think I've seen
Rui Capela on here before, so he may actually be reading this anyway.
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