These images demonstrate the enabling/disabling of the "Ramp volume at start of sample" feature emulated from the registered verson of Impulse Tracker.
I often disable ramping, because in Schism, as well as Impulse Tracker, it would tend to really take the attack off of sharp percussive sounds.
However, Schism's implementation does not only disable the ramp at the start of the sample, it disables it for volume envelopes and volume effects as well.
Ideally, disabling volume ramping in the sense intended will allow samples to play back with no ramp at the beginning, ramping enabled for any envelopes or volume effects in the duration of the sample, and, this may be debatable, but enable volume ramping at the end of the sample for commands like IXX SCX and possible even OXX, though Impulse Tracker did not ramp the I or O command when volume ramping was disabled.
The main problem I hear, and this also affects the usability of the proposed automated multi-channel wav writer, is that some tracks will need to be rendered with ramping disabled; ex: percussion tracks, and some tracks will need to be rendered with ramping enabled; ex: any track with bass tones or sounds that tend to overexpose the artifacts the disabling of ramping for envelopes/effects cause.
I've added another image to the bottom to demonstrate whav volume ramping at the start of the sample does to a nice hi-hat sound.
Huh. Impulse had an invert sample key? Was this just in the registered version or did I seriously not know about it all the years I'd been using it?
only in registered. made for cool HXX phasing commands, too :D
In the meantime, I am dealing with the schism source to see if I can resolve the ramping issue myself. I'm going to shorten the ramp length to taste, and observe how it affects bass tones.
setting VOLRAMPLEN to 2 (as opposed to 146)
ln 12 sndmix.cpp
and
ln 92 to 2 samples rather than 8
allows me to _preserve nice long volume ramping in envelopes_, gives a nice sharp attack at the beginning of samples (2 samples), and does not disable volume ramping for Dxy commands.. it does however cause hard click/cuts for SCx, Oxx, Ixy. This was the behavior of IT with VRAS disabled.
^ this is with volume ramping at start "enabled". If I disable VRAS in schism, it also disables all volume ramping for envelopes.