This wish asks to bring the Synth Engines found on the Play+ to the Polyend Tracker Mini.
We assume that the CPU of the Tracker Mini has sufficient resources/headroom to run these synth engines alongside the sample-based tracks currently available.
Otherwise stripped down versions, or an implementation where the engine locks multiple tracks to get the necessary resources would be acceptable.
What is the problem?
Currently the Tracker is only a sample based groovebox. You cannot really do sound design other than Granular, Wavtable, filtering, envelopes and destructive manipulation through the Sample Editor.
What do you want to achieve?
Bring ACD, FAT, VAP and WTFM to the Firmware of the Tracker mini.
Are there any workarounds?
Working with samples or sampling external devices.
We need this. So much potential. Maybe something like how famitracker does it with swapping between instruments in the sample loader. Or like the eletron digitakt where you trigger the synth engine polyphony, each voice using the instrument parameters to the maximum amount of voices.
I think if they were visually implemented the way synths are on M8 tracker it would be incredible.
with the joypad that synth UI is a joy to use. all parameters on 1 page. use joypad to navigate around, hold enter (joypad middle button) & use ± to adjust value.
with this kind of layout you could fit a lot of parameters on a single screen.
If you can change instruments between the sample and synth mode. Can you highlight which instruments are synth or sample, this is an example from how famitracker differentiates between engines.
Looking into the the Play sound engines a bit more, I wanted to ask if they are setup with the instrument parameters being global to the polyphony or individual voice can keep its own parameters? I would like to see if its possible to have the sound engines like the Elektron Digitone and Famitracker where the instrument injects the sound to one of the synth voices and will cuts the oldest note if all voices are being used. Being you can make a full track (perc,bass,lead,pads) with 4 tracks and 8 voices on the Digitone.
I could see a lot of sound design possibilities either way.
If the wishes I see on the top 10 for the mini (including this one) are what we can expect to be the roadmap, that would make of the mini a sick device
I saw that, in contrary to this wish, that other wish asking to bring Plaits and Braids to the Play+ was declined, I guess it has to do with the effort for porting from another code base which is supposed to work in a different hardware architecture.
That’s totally understandable, and I would already be so happy to see the ACD, FAT, VAP and WTFM engines on the tracker.
But there are things to consider or to get inspired from on the Plaits & Braids engines for maybe future Polyend synth engines development, for example the FM engine in Plaits with DX7 preset compatibility is very attractive. The vowel engine is very fun too.
Great idea!.. an addition to this suggestion, assuming this could see the light of day, is a random tone generator that comes along with it, for those not really into doing deep dive sound designs. This feature is on the 707 aswell, works perfect. Just an idea.