Any modern alternative to Shortcircuit?

[wikter]

And if I remember correctly SC1 had this weird attack issue, basically like a slow attack envelope of a few ms. This could result in a less pronounce initial attack weak in transients, especially with drums / percussive sounds. It was probably fixed in the last version.

Yes, SC1 has initial attack at 0.9 ms iirc and that cause me to not continue to use it anymore years ago

Sorry mate, 0,9ms with a sample that can be offsetted 1ms is 0*slow attack. Sampling is for creative people. In fact, if you want a well sounding drum sound, it's great to preserve the first transients that can use up to 3 ms before max level.
And of course, you can chang the ramp to -10 to get pretty fast attack.

[keyman_sam]

This is phenomenal news! Can the devs *pplease* focus on polishing SC1 first before attempting SC2?

SC1 on it's way to SC2 would be a much better path than simply starting off with SC2, imho.

[EvilDragon]

(Un)fortunately we only have source code to SC2, not SC1. (I put "un" in parentheses, because fortunately we have at least something!) So it's going to be a lot of back and forth and filling in the holes. Some holes might not be filled (IIRC SC2 doesn't have all the effects that SC1 had, unfortunately nothing we can do about that).

But there's also going to be a number of changes to streamline/improve UI and UX. In short, it will be a whole new thing, we're calling it Shortcircuit XT internally. We do want to retain the essence of what SC was about, though (similarly to what we're doing with Surge).

[Saffran]

Why not shortening it.
SHOIT.XT

[Erisian]

Is there any VST sample player/sampler plugin that is comparable to Shortcircuit and is modern?

In particular it has features that are very important to me:
- minimalistic single screen layout
- extensive mod matrix
- envelopes, LFOs and filters

I'd keep using it forever tbh, but there's this rather notable issue that gets in the way of the workflow - it was developed for much smaller resolutions that were popular at its time and has never been updated since. Everything on it looks small at 1080p, not to mention nigh unusable at 4K.


Alternatively I wander if there's anything/any hack that can scale old VST plugins so they become comfortable to use with modern resolutions?

Might not be your cup of tea but Kirsty roland's free modular synth Analogy 64 comes with a wave player. I have been using it together with a pluck sound that I generated in Audacity.

(I had to use a small "r" to remove the stupid autolink)

[EvilDragon]

Actually, I've just checked out the codebase... all the SC1 filters and effects ARE there, they would just need hooking up to the GUI. Good news, I suppose (once they're actually implemented and working)!

[fladd]

Would be great if you were considering some of the workflow advantages SC1 had over SC2, when redesigning. If I remember correctly, SC2 did not have the same fantastic sample group feature of SC1. It was amazing for layering drum samples, since you could just add samples in the group, have settings (e.g. ADSR) on the sample level for each sample, AND on the group level on top of that. SC1 was really one of the best (if not the best) software samplers out there. I am using Renoise/Redux these days, but there are still features that I miss from SC1 (sample groups is one of them).

[EvilDragon]

Yes, groups from SC1 must happen. SC2 had layers, but this was with different usage in mind. However, if we intend to have both SC1 and SC2 patch compatibility, we need to figure out a way to make both ways work, and that is tricky.

Also, we will likely go the Falcon route and allow loading multiple samples in a single zone, with options to play them simultaneously as layered, or different styles of round robin.


(BTW, there was no ADSR on group level in SC1... it basically acted as a batch editor for per-zone ADSRs for all zones in the group.)

[Danno]

Subscribing. I loved SC1 and I'd love to use it again.

[MTorn]

Hey, I'm just too curious, is there any updates to the progress of this?
From the look of it, if it happens, it will be very close to my idea of the perfect sample player.

In the meantime, do you know what level of SFZ import capability is expected? Will you attempt something close to the full SFZ V2 opcode set, or will it be a limited selection, more like TAL Sampler and Zampler?
I'm getting deep into converting my sample library to SFZ, and it would be great of these will be able to be imported fairly well into Shortcircuit XT.

[synthgeek]

Actually, I've just checked out the codebase... all the SC1 filters and effects ARE there, they would just need hooking up to the GUI. Good news, I suppose (once they're actually implemented and working)!

Good news indeed!

[lpr]

DirectWave?

[thermal]

Very cool! Will there be an AU version for us Logic users like there is with Surge?

Also, what is the pitch shifting algorithm like - I've always found software samplers to be bad at this and Logic's Sampler aliases horribly when pitching up hihats and such unless you set the session sample rate to 96k (which isn't ideal either because nearly all my samples are at 44.1k). And whichever way you do it, pitching down drums with Sampler sounds awful, the transients just smear into mush.

The Akai S1000 was awesome at pitch shifting, apparently due to its 8-point windowed sinc interpolation, whatever that means. This is what I want in my dream software sampler! Haven't checked if TAL did this in TAL-Sampler but that plugin is not great as a drum sampler imo. Geist 2 has been my workhorse for that, however it's not very stable under Big Sur and is basically abandonware at this point. A real shame.

I realise it's probably too much work to make changes to the Shortcircuit pitch shifting algo itself, but is it perhaps possible to implement an HQ mode with oversampling?

[EvilDragon]

Sure, AU is a matter of course.

I don't think we will be changing any interpolation algorithms for the initial release. But I think SC already does use some form of sinc interpolation. At any rate you can find old versions on vst4free and have a go at them. This is how SCXT will also sound.

TAL-Sampler is emulating S1000 in way more detail than we ever could, by the way. They have a dedicated S1000 DAC emulation mode.

[MaliceX]

Hey, I'm just too curious, is there any updates to the progress of this?
From the look of it, if it happens, it will be very close to my idea of the perfect sample player.

In the meantime, do you know what level of SFZ import capability is expected? Will you attempt something close to the full SFZ V2 opcode set, or will it be a limited selection, more like TAL Sampler and Zampler?
I'm getting deep into converting my sample library to SFZ, and it would be great of these will be able to be imported fairly well into Shortcircuit XT.

sfz was initially non-functional. I did contribute at least sfz v1 support to some degree in the SCXT codebase in January. That will probably be expanded later once stuff like sample groups and whatnot is re-implemented properly.