Comb Proposal

[Andreya-Autumn]

Hello! I don't know how you feel about taking PR's for this one, especially ones that change its sound. Lemme know your thoughts on that.

Here's a proposal though. A lot of cool comb filter sounds live under 1 ms, so it feels a bit sad not to permit that range. :) Also, at 50ms it seems to almost always make a sorta unmusical-sounding mess. So this proposal changes the total range to 0.05...10ms. And also makes those params logarithmic like the fade param is.

Sounds great generally, but there always was an issue with the feedback mode (all the way since 2005 as I recall...), that high feedback values will decrease overall volume, except for the occassional hyper loud hard-clipped shriek. This problem of course gets exacerbated at the shorter delay times, so as a temporary fix I've just clamped the param range at 0.6.

It'd be better dynamically change that depending on comb type, and even better to adress the dynamics of the feedback mode. But both of those are beyond me today.

[eventual-recluse]

Your PR & suggestions are definitely improvements. But I'd like to keep this version as close as possible to the original Livecut in sound and behaviour.

I was thinking of starting another (called LiveCut Plus or something), or having another branch, for just these kinds of changes.

In the past I played around with different changes and had extra stuff like more subdiv options & manual tempo controls which made for some interesting sounds. So it could be nice to have a version with a few extras and improvements like you suggest.

There's also the whole question of making the back end code real-time safe (the files in plugins/LiveCut/lib)... It currently uses valarrays, standard rand() and lots of vectors.

[Andreya-Autumn]

Right. That all makes total sense. I've sometimes been thinking of that LiveCut+ idea too. I'd love that, but it's way outside of my reach to do alone.

I'm on the Surge Synth Team, and nowadays we have a little camp of friend-devs who have channels in our Discord space (while still releasing plugins under their own names). It's a friendly helpful space for projects like this, there's other devs around who like to help each other out, and a solid crew of testers.

Most of the other devs there know JUCE better than DISTHRO, but could maybe still be helpful somehow. One friend of mine for example, pointed to an issue with imgui (I'll make a separate issue for it) that you'd be very welcome to come over and discuss if you'd like.

Lemme know if that sounds interesting!

[eventual-recluse]

Well, the reason for this little project was to learn about audio plugin development. So I'm definitely interested, though I'm still very much a learner.

[Andreya-Autumn]

Yeah very much the same here. You know more than me I'm sure. :) Anyway, follow the discord link on this page: https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/feedback