Surge Shortcircuit - could it become a surge xt module?

Shortcircuit looks a worthy sampling instrument. There’s not (that I know of) a sampler for Rack that handles multisamples. Some of the Shortcircuit features like filters aren’t needed because there’s many filter modules you can hook it to.

2 Likes

It would be cool to have something where you could create the multi sample instruments. But there is this VCV Library - Squinky Labs SFZ Player

2 Likes

Sfz player has handled multi samples for years.

3 Likes

The thing that’s different with ShortCircuit is that they’re making a general purpose sampler, something like Kontakt, without, you know being obtuse like Kontakt. The SFZ Player is fine if you have Sound Fonts you like.

Sfz is not sound fonts. It’s more like a kontakt bank. But it’s true sfz player does not record.

Surge Synth Team member here. Cool to see you’re excited about Shortcircuit XT!

Couple thoughts though. First, I wanna be clear that Shortcircuit XT is not primarily intended as a Kontakt-alike, nor as a Sforzando-alike. The main design goal is more “personal/creative sampler” than "library/soundfont samper - though we are aiming to make it, let’s say, reasonably good for the latter also. Because we figure some folks just want a free soundfont or sfz player with, like, MPE, good microtuning support, accessibility etc etc.

The strength of original Shortcircuit wasn’t library playback though. SC1 was apparently loved for its “load a couple samples and mangle them in interesting ways” creative flow, and that’s still the core goal we’re working towards (while also expanding the scope a bit).

Anyway, on and off we’ve discussed what of the SCXT DSP we could integrate into VCV rack. And the answer is we’re not exactly sure, but we know that “Shortcircuit XT as a module” as an idea doesn’t make any sense. SCXT is kinda modular in itself, each zone gets a set of processors (filters and other effects) which you can re-order, you have a mixer that can sum stuff or send to separate outputs etc etc, you have handling of multiple samples and the hierarchy they’re organized into, etc etc… None of that really belongs in a modular ecosystem.

So, SCXT itself won’t become a (single) module, that’s for sure. But parts of it will get into the Surge set for sure! Me and a couple others have been having lots of fun thinking/coding up processors for the aforementioned signal chains, which we’ll almost certainly add to the Surge XT module set eventually. We’ve also tossed around the idea of making a module which is basically a single SCXT zone. That is, all the sample playback features that a single unit in Shortcircuit XT has (pitch and volume control, up to 16 round-robins, etc). We might do that! But definitely not before the 1.0 release of SCXT. Which we’re trying to make happen this winter, possibly…

6 Likes

Thank you for the writeup! And all of that sounds awesome, it’s exactly this kind of “use relevant stuff from Shortcircuit XT as modules, in the vein of Surge XT” I’ve had my fingers crossed for, for the future, hahh. The stuff this team has done, and is doing, is just fabulous.

Those who want a peek at what the Shortcircuit experience looks like (remembering that it’s a work in progress!), here is someone checking out Shortcircuit XT about three months ago. I love the routing structure and semi-modularity already seen here. And the processing demonstrated also sounds ace :smile:

Oh, I had not seen that video, thanks for sharing!

We’ve come a long way in the three months since that video was made, But let me also be clear that we’re not yet in a place where having many beta testers is useful. For example because any “this doesn’t work” report has about an 85% chance of receiving a “we know” response. :upside_down_face: Which is sort of wasteful of everyone’s time.

Great to see the excitement though! We’ll make an announcement when we move to open beta!

2 Likes

There’s also some technical challenges. Some of the choices we made in short circuit require macOS 10.13 (released 7 years ago) but rack requires macOS 10.9 (released 11 years ago) so big swaths of the synth will be tricky unless vortico ups that requirement (or if we just lie when we submit to the library - chuckle)

And of course the biggest technical challenge is time! It’s exciting to see how much we’ve done since that video and scary to think how much we still have to do before that video is a sensible thing to make!

But the way we’ve factored stuff gives us other approaches too. Short circuit has added a large number of “voice effects” (basically polyphonic effects) to the codebase and we have factored all that to be distinct from short circuit so we might do something like a surge rack 2.n which adds 23 shortcircuit voice effects - all still up in the air

And as with all things we see an open contribution project. Everyone welcome. But I’ll echo Andreyas point that testing for feature completeness at this stage is pretty frustrating (although at least now I’ve added a function to pop a clear message when something’s not done for many things) so the sort of bulk community testing we’ve done with other things is still months out

2 Likes

Oh and anticipating the inevitable “I get you its early but can I test it anyway” questions:

there’s the nightly. We think we can maintain streaming stability from hereon out and are not going to capriciously break it, but its not guaranteed, and big big features (like missing sample resolution and modulation in groups consistently) are still not there.

I do useful things with the available samplers, but it looks cool. And unless I’ve missed it, there isn’t any really good, sophisticated sampler modules for Rack just yet.

Of course NOW someone will yell me about a module that fits the bill. I don’t mind being wrong.

And i can load shortcircuit in VCV Host.

Yeah a short circuit zone as a module or even part would be fun in rack but would be very challenging (and like I said impossible to get into the library with current constraints so a non starter anyway)

But look rack is an important part of the surge ecosystem so we are thinking about it. But porting an unfinished sampler to unfinishable rack modules would be an error. So first thing first finish up the plugin

Super glad for all the enthusiasm here though. We all think sc will be a super fun instrument when (if?) it’s shipping at 1.0

1 Like

If there’s some code to leverage, maybe it can inspire a Surge sample player that fits the modular environment.

Yeah that 10.9 constraint would make it tricky / impossible. Short circuit has a core library which is 10.13 and higher. But I’ve chatted with @cschol about this so maybe there’s hope for something in 2025?

And while the just-the-dsp approach we took with surge would be useful for some parts like the voice effects (and I bet we will bang them into the surge rack) the core architecture of zone / voice etc would be fairly easy to port in rack but impossible to comply with the constraint allowing users running a 7-11 year old version of the os to use library modules.