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Comment by dimatura

1 day ago

were you using single cycle waveforms or longer samples? in the former case, I guess there's not much to it, you just cycle through the waveform (in which case the waveform you choose would usually start and end at a zero crossing by construction, like sines, triangles, etc - or, if it does not, well, that will just create extra harmonics that might or not be desirable). For the second case, it's more subtle. Most samplers that implement this feature will assume correct loop points (usually, but not necessarily at a zero crossing) are chosen manually by the user. Some of them implement cross-fading at the looping point to make that more forgiving, but that may be CPU/RAM intensive for some devices. If you're referring to small clicks you may get at the start and stop of sample playback, it's fairly common to use very short (ms or less) fade-in/fade-out to avoid that. There's a lot of books out there, but the main one I've read and enjoyed is this one, that happens to be free: https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/book/synthesis/. it's more of a textbook than a cookbook.

Thanks! Reading the code again, looks like I was filling up buffer of 256 x 16 bit samples.

I think the issue with looping at arbitrary points was word alignment. You need to give it a whole buffer. So you'd have to do some nasty bit-shifting.

Per other reply, I think doing it live is probably easisest!

Thanks for the recommendation. If I ever get back into this I'll take a look.