since the MOD puts emphasis on the “pedalboard” paradigm and its processing power is somewhat limited I would really like to have a programmable audio router.
I do build my own MIDI-footswitches which work fine with the MOD, but the routing switching capabilities are too lacking to make use of its full potential (especially for my latest build which has 10 switches )
Of course guitarists that use traditional pedalboards sometimes run into the situation of having limited processing power (some pedals are just too expensive to have two or three copies of) and they found a way to create more complex sound “presets” from this limited number of pedals. In guitarist’s terms these devices are called “loopers” (probably because they loop into a pedal and back) and some of them are controllable via MIDI. Not to be confused with loopers that record and playback loops of audio.
So here’s the simplest version of the thing I’d like to have. I’m even willing to implement it myself (as I have developed LADSPA and LV2 plugins in the past). I’m just wondering about the capabilities of the MOD-host to enable this paradigm:
A looper plugin that has two main inputs and two main outputs (stereo) and N (where N is on the order of 10) additional stereo send/receive pairs.
Into each of the send/receive pairs one “normal” plugin would be plugged.
The looper plugin would have, as a GUI, a matrix with N rows (the number of send/return loops) and M columns (M being on the order of 10 again - the number of “presets”) of switches. The switch in position (#n, #m) would control whether send/return loop #n is active or bypassed in preset #m.
This plugin would have a MIDI in (as the normal MIDI-learn functionality is not suited for this).
So here’s the question: Is anybody already hacking on something like this? If not, does anyone plan to? And if not either, what’s the best way to get up to speed for developing for the MOD? Especially relevant extensions, etc…
this would also be useful for reordering plugins within a preset - so not just being able to switch the looper on and off, but within a preset change the order of the effects, and the settings for each one… would make every single board so much more powerful (assuming the loop-switcher itself didn’t eat up all the processing power )
Right! Now that you mention it. The problem is that you get “loops” in the processing graph. Since the problem itself is not recurrent, but rather a continuous flow and the problem is mapping it to a single client I guess an alternative would be separate stereo A/B toggles that listen to program changes and in their respective GUIs one would setup whether the particular switch is on A or B for the different programs…
yes… i believe if we could re-order presets, and access any arbitrary preset (with MIDI CC or MOD Control Chain messages), that would meet most people’s needs.
I think presents and switches is the solution, however inelegant, though I can’t imagine the creation of such a plugin would be too difficult.
I can see Steve’s point, but I think in a way, the order switching and activating is almost a description of pedal board switching, which has its latency.
I wonder if a solution I’ve proposed before might work - that is, an option to select pedal boards continuously loaded in RAM. Obviously we will have CPU and ram limits having extra pedals continuously ‘active’ (though not connected or running within the active pedal board).
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