Please remove the "missing samples" paradigm
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One very annoying problem in Kontakt is the dreaded "missing samples" dialog. If Kontakt can't find the samples, it pops up a message to allow you to find the samples. That's fine, except that if you do not find the samples, it deletes all zones that have missing samples. It's a big problem when you simply want to share the kontakt NKI with, say, a hired scripter, and said scripter needs to download gigs of audio to avoid the missing samples problem just to make some changes to the NKI.
HISE, please do not follow in the footsteps of Kontakt.
#1. If samples are missing, do not delete zones/settings/etc.
#2. If samples are disabled, do not bring up a "missing samples" dialog for those samples.
#3. When you copy-to-clipboard a Sampler module (so you can do some text find/replace), the zones should be created regardless of whether the files exist or not.HISE of course does not have a missing samples dialog, it simply deletes the zones without telling you. I'm sure HISE will be implemented with a missing samples dialog at some point, just please fix this horrible paradigm of deleting zones.
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Seems reasonable. I really didn't put much effort into handling missing samples yet, but I will definitely keep the zones and mark them "faulty" somehow and let the user replace the references later if he wants to.
But I think for the HISE Player plugin there will be an automatic missing samples dialog.
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One idea a developer and I were discussing was the possibility of selling a sample library instrument, say, a drumkit, and selling the pieces individually. The samples would be defined in the instrument, but they would be simply disabled until the samples are found i.e. until the user has them on their hard drive after purchasing.
The reason this would be done is so that all the kit pieces are correctly placed in the instrument structure, the routing, script handling, etc. The only feature needed to make this possible is the ability to disable missing samples dialog for certain conditions for the end product / end user. When you implement the ability to purge samples (done via script API), I suggest also adding a "disabled" parameter.
Purged: unloaded from RAM + WILL ask for missing samples
Disabled: unloaded from RAM + will not ask for missing samples- In all cases, zones are never deleted.
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- You could add a button, right click menu, or wherever, an option to "remove all missing sample zones" which is helpful when you want to remove bad takes you later found in the sample pool (aka files), or had to update the sample pool in some way.
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Yes but for the normal scenario a "missing" state would be also needed, in which case it will ask if the user should point to the new directory.
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I think we should look at use case scenarios to figure out if there's actually a better way to approach the concept of having libraries with addons, all possible from a single master patch that senses which samples are present. For example, imagine creating a drum library that could be expanded with additional addon packs without needing to download a patch that addresses very specific ownership conditions (e.g. you own these two addons, but not this one…)
Having a missing samples indication is very important, though. If there are samples that are corrupt or in the wrong location, it's important for the user to know upon loading the library. That way they don't start playing and wonder why certain notes aren't playing.
Speaking of which, here's a semi-related request: the ability to purge single samples. Kontakt can only purge samples on an entire group basis. Maybe it isn't necessary with the whole containers thing, but just having more control over things like that would be a big improvement. It wasn't until Kontakt 5 until we could check the purge state of groups, even though you could purge groups via scripting back in Kontakt 4. So the lack of complete "getters" and "setters" for everything is one of those nuisances in Kontakt.
