What is the problem?
Although you can always smoothen out the attack of a triggered sample with the amp attack parameter or by editing the sample, the way the Tracker handles stopping playback of the previously played sample is not as easy to control.
You can place a FAD command at the step before triggering the new sample playback, but that isn’t always possible (eg when trigger a sample on each 16th note) and curiously it doesn’t always remove the problem (sometimes placing a FAD command 2 or 3 steps prior will remove the click while placing it just 1 step prior will not).
What should this feature achieve?
Remove the unwanted clicks and pops when switching playback from a sample to the next, or when retriggering the same sample.
In terms of how to solve the problem, I tend to want to leave this to the product team than prescribing solutions. However, here are some ideas:
- A. Add just the slightest form of smoothing of the waveform during sample switches in the form of fading out the previous sample for x milliseconds. Think of it as a minimum form of amp release that’s triggered prior to a new sample/note being played.
- B. Add just the slightest crossover between the playback of the two sample trigs for x milliseconds. (This is how Ableton does it, I believe, but I assume this is more complicated than the previous idea.)
Are there any workarounds?
Adding carefully placed FAD events when there’s room in between sample triggers. This doesn’t always work though.
Any links to related discussions?
There are seemingly countless of mentions of pops and clicks across the forum but I couldn’t find one that addressed the issue of the abrupt note-off of the previous sample to the new amp attack of the next sample. So, there seems to be a family of issues with pops and clicks and this wish only solves for one class of that problem.
Any references to other products?
Ableton was mentioned in example implementation B above. That implementation probably requires more generous audio buffers and processing through so I’m assuming that a simpler solution is necessary here, like the idea A above.