Gotcha. Except that there’s 30+ years of Mac/Win DAW convention here to take into account here,
and neither platform’s apps (which most everyone learned on and is familiar with) used that style of waveform representation, so it’s neither familiar nor intuitive to most users.
Further, I can’t really imagine that drawing sampled waveforms is gonna bring the SSP to its knees CPU-wise, since there’s not some DAW-like scenario where you’ve potentially got a vast number of onscreen waveforms being drawn/scrolled at all times. We’re just talking about in cases where the Recorder or Sampler are in use, really.
So anyway, as requested, here are some screenshots:
The above one is straight-up, generic SoundForge Pro waveform editing. Pretty self-explanatory.
Unglamorous, utilitarian, but quite usable. The waveform colors are customizable, though the ones
shown here aren’t particularly great. However, it covers all the basics; both channels of a stereo file,
conventional style waveform display allowing the expected high-precision operation/selection, all relevant file info shown as well.
By contrast, the above shows the sample editor in the ER-301. Much smaller and less powerful than using a computer, but it’s a tiny display and packs a lot of power and information in. Select with Shift-EncoderLeft/RIght, zoom with Coarse/Fine+Encoder. The Menu option takes you to slicing options and the DSP functions I mentioned in my other post (Normalize, Fades, Trim, DC Offset Removal, etc.) Pretty damn usable considering the screen size and interface limitations (no mouse/kbd.) Not world class, but it’ll get you out of a jam when working with samples on the 301, and the color scheme is nice to look at.
Here’s the same display zoomed in:
Good for high-precision selection.
Taking it waaay back to the 80s, here’s the old Alchemy waveform editor:
Old-school but still very clear and usable. Customizable colors, navigation key shortcuts, generally totally obvious to use if you were familiar with any similar apps, all the info you need onscreen at once.
Back in modern DAW-land, here’s a closeup from the current Pro Tools HD:
Pretty much the industry standard, of course. Obviously a DAW, so a different context than the SSP,
but very fast to navigate. Keyboard shortcuts to instantly change zoom factor, navigate
to selection start/end, and so on, or zoom dynamically with the mouse. The ruler at the top is customizable to whatever units you want (samples, bars/beats, SMPTE, etc), so you always know where you are and how long
the sample is.
Hopefully, this is a reasonable cross-section that gives a little historical context and a sense of expected norms
in the sample-editor world. Basically, I’d be happy if the SSP even just had something like the Alchemy
version shown above, or the ER-301’s, since both are totally usable, and it’ll be possible to use a mouse & keyboard at some point in the not-too-distant future, which is super important for this task.
Hope this helps. Let me know if I can provide anything else.
