Simpified sampling

[Nicolas Steven Miller]

Sampling is confusing in the current system.

The idea of having to type filenames exactly is hard on the user. Streaming from the SD card is painful to deal with. We want to play samples from sdram whenever possible. Different patches may reference particular samples.

Revised approach:

1. Drag and drop or browse host machine for samples to add to the sd card.
2. play object is aware of all samples on the sd card. Build up a list at startup.
3. play has a mechanism for selecting a set of samples to be loaded into sdram at patch load, from a dropdown or popup in the patcher.
4. play has inlets that allow advancing to the next sample in the set while the patch is live.
5. Other usual sample operations: start and stop position, transposition, etc.

As a short hand, if the play object is in the patch, and the total size of samples on the sdcard is smaller than available sdram, possibly just load everything in.

To simply play back audio, the average user should not be forced to think about the distinction between sdram, the sd card, flash, sram and so on. Or even creating a signal that indexes into the audio data properly.