Announcing a new module! “Cue Research”. It’s a sample player that lets you add markers. When sample playback hits a marker, it sends a trigger to one of 32 outputs.
Add multiple cue points (markers) for any of the 32 trigger outputs
Zoom and pan the top waveform for precise marker placement
Adjustable playhead using the mouse
Double click on the top waveform to add or remove markers
Lock all markers (context menu)
Adjustable trigger lengths (context menu)
My specific use-case is to add effects to AI generated songs in specific playback locations. There’s still a little bit of development left, like caching some of the waveform rendering calculations for improved performance, but all of the main features are done.
Thanks Stephan! I’m also hoping to bring this concept to Autobreak eventually. This would allow a lot more flexibility in the types of samples that it could handle.
Cool! I am testing it and I like it a lot! I have one request though – a way to adjust the sample speed. Cause otherwise it limits you to the samples with the same tempo as your track. Well, unless you want something polyrhythmic… But then you still have to do math and like 90 vs 120 is fine, but say I have 127 bpm. 127 is a prime number and I don’t have any samples in this tempo (well, my current patch is 114bpm and it turns out I don’t have any 114bpm/228bpm/57bpm/171bpm samples either). So yeah, a way to adjust the sample speed would be really appreciated!
**also is it possible to save the markers maps or something? Cause when you change your sample, it clears the markers, and sometimes you just want a different sample with the same markers…
Sure, I can do that! I’ll create a new context menu item called, “Clear markers when loading new sample”, and I’ll have it turned OFF as default. That’s great feedback. Thank you!
Although you probably found this out, I’ll mention that there’s a context menu for clearing all markers:
If you right-click on a marker, there’s an context menu option to delete it. I added those context menus in case new users are unaware of the double-click method.
Other features I’ve been considering:
New menu item for placing markers automatically based on various algorithms.
New menu item for placing markers at regular intervals
Add a touch of padding to the left and right waveform displays to make it easier to click on the scrubber when it’s at the edges of the waveforms.
I can do this relatively easily, but I’m not sure how to do it in a way that easily maps from one BPM to another. Would it be sufficient to add a context menu with various speed adjustments, such as:
I’d say it would be better to have a knob, yeah. Cause sometimes it’s tricky to finetune the bpm and going to the context menu all the time would probably drive me insane, haha. So yeah, a knob is better!
Another thing that I think would be great to have is a CV for markers. Like when this input receives a trigger, it puts a marker on a selected… map (or a matrix output, you know what I mean). And maybe CV to select a map from a matrix (to record the triggers for markers). So like CV selecting patterns in the Groovebox (but for recording markers. I don’t know if me overexplaining all these things makes it more confusing, haha).
So yeah… as for bugs – I don’t think I encountered any bugs or glitches yet. A great module and it works great too!
Let me rephrase your feature ideas, just so I know that I’m understanding correctly:
You’d like a way to create markers automatically at the current playback position using a trigger input? (And subsequently, a way of choosing which output(s) the created marker is associated with?)
You’d like to have various marker layouts that are CV select-able?
My first impression is that feature #2 makes a lot of sense to me. I’m not sure about #1 though. Could you tell me how that feature would be helpful?
Thanks, as always! Marker “banks” is a great idea. I’ll also add an option to loop sample playback. At the moment, sample playback always stops at the end of the sample. That’ll still be the default.
Well, the first one, haha. I actually though about it while you were writing the response and yeah, I am not sure if it is really needed, cause you can just use the source of these triggers to trigger whatever. Well, unless they are chaotic or something, but yeah. Also it might be good for visualizing the trigger events based on your sample, but otherwise it is kinda useless.
I like the idea about CV selectable banks for maps though. It wasn’t my initial idea, but let’s pretend it was…
Oh, quick question about the sample speed playback. I don’t know if my increments will work very well. For example, if you have a sample at 105 BPM and need to match another sample at 127 BPM, you’d have to multiply the playback speed by…1.20952380952.
Oh shoot… and you’re probably hoping that it would playback at the same pitch, too, right?
I don’t really care about pitch to be honest… i mean, I like pitch shifting stuff. Well, if you figure out a way to keep the pitch that’s also fine with me…
As for making a sample completely locked to whatever tempo - I don’t really care either. I just retrigger samples when they start to lose synchronization and it sounds bad (I actually do that with simpliciter and other samplers in VCV). Sometimes it sounds interesting for a while… So maybe for other people that would be better to have like smaller increments to match the bpm perfectly, but for me - i don’t care to be honest, as long as it’s roughly around the desired bpm - I am happy… So maybe choosing increments in the context menu would be a good thing to have? Like 0.01 / 0.05 / whatever else… But I think most of the people would just tune it to the BPM roughly and then just retrigger it when it unsyncs
what a great new module, after playing with it a bit I another feature request
would it be possible to have a start and an end marker for the samples to set the range of the sample to loop?
example: when I have a 1 bar loop,
I could set the start maker to the second step of the bar and the end marker to the fourth step of the bar, then I get a loop that is half the length of a bar.
just one little bug:
my mouse pointer often looks like the one in the edit window(the two arrows) for the markers, and I need to hover over the edit window of the cue research to get the normal look of it again, that is happening too when I don’t edit the markers
this is turning into something super cool! i hope you implement the algorithm auto-markers, the room at each end for easy scrolling is a fabulous touch too, and an auto grid of regular intervals is also clutch
Thanks for all of the great feedback! I’ll be working on the module tonight (hopefully) and I’ll report back what I accomplish. @rsmus7 I’ll try and find out why the mouse pointer gets stuck.
It’s a sample player that lets you add markers. When sample playback hits a marker, it sends a trigger to one of 32 outputs.
I’ll create a new context menu item called, “Clear markers when loading new sample”, and I’ll have it turned OFF as default. That’s great feedback. Thank you! 
