Blue ones are send connections.

Message.setNoteNumber() - is your friend here.

Message.setTransposeAmount is your real friend if you don‘t want to handle the note off manually

I appreciate that certain genres of dance music have no groove at all...but the rest of the world - not so much. Which thinking about it is probably why Massive and Serum (and the like) are not so popular outside those genres

That‘s a fair point but a framework for virtual instruments should make this assumption and offer both options.

However I am being used to start the playback on the bar start and if I don‘t I am used to tempo-synced stuff to behave a bit weird (if you trigger an arpeggiator it will also go off beat).

Also its very useful for debugging customer issues because you can check whether it happens because of a particular DAW or in general (most customers have only one DAW installed)

If it‘s used in a synth the timing will be synched by the note ons, but for effects it might indeed be useful to have it synced to the play position.

So in the end you only have as many samplers as you have "channels" in your mixer

Well if you have release samples, you would use another sampler but run them through the same channel as the sustain (or whatever) samples, wouldn't you?

But I get that it's pretty hard to make generic statements about how many Samplers to use for a particular project, but I can imagine that there's a possibility of using less than 50 samplers but achieve the same effect.

Would it be the same to load a single sampler with a 12-voice limit as loading 2 samplers with a 6-voice limit?

That's the real question here From a loading time perspective / memory consumption, it doesn't make a big difference whether you have 2x6 or 1x12 samplers, but if you use 12 samplers with one voice you get a worse performance than with 1 sampler.

Anyways, a good idea is to load a basic sample set at the beginning (maybe purge a few mic positions in the default state), because my guess is that it's the sample loading that takes so much time. That being said, 8 seconds is not super unreasonable for a VST with a high sample count.

Group FX, modulators, and routing would be really helpful for situations like this.

Nah, that's just duplicating the existing structure. If you need to route a number of samples to a different modulator, FX chain or whatever, it's an own entity and deserves a dedicated module.

Also, using many samplers is not particularly bad, you just need to make sure that you limit the voice amount in each Sampler to the lowest possible amount, because that's where the Sampler module sucks up resources (the rest is pretty trivial). So eg. for a closed hi hat sampler a voice amount of 5 or 6 voices together with the Kill second voice mechanism should be fine.

If you leave the Sampler voice amount at its default level of 256 voices, then you'll have 50 * 256 voices = 12800 voices that need to be allocated. Each voice has two streaming buffer of 4096 samples and even with HLAC and just a single stereo mic, you're using 3.5GB of memory for one instance just for the internal streaming buffers (multiply this value for each mic position). And this does not include any preloaded samples or image resources, so I would say the 15 seconds loading time are your smallest problem

Try to go through every single sampler module and reduce the voice amount (and voice limit) to the very lowest number where you still don't hear notes being killed.

You need to run the batchcreate.bat in the same folder (but you also need doxygen installed on your computer to work).

Enumerate the samplemaps IDs if you plan to add more later on. If you're really picky, use trailing zeroes and remove the first characters on the UI.

Where do you set the ID? It‘s empty by default AFAIK...