2008/4/27 mike clemow <gelfmuse@gmail.com>:
Hey Kassen,

I'm looking at the examples...  This is quite interesting.  I think
you've mentioned LiSa a few times on this list before.

Oh, yes, I'm sure I did !
 
 Could you
maybe give a high-level overview of her for the uninitiated?

Sure. Atte is right in that she's basically a recorder with a variable playback rate. There's a bit more going on as well.

LiSa can record incoming material which can then be played back. Playback can happen while recording. She can also play back the same material with multiple voices. All of these voices can have a attack and decay slope and have loops as well in addition to their own start offsets and loop-points and now even volume. Oh, and you can have feed-back.

That's may sound like the spec-sheet of a modest sampler (which is cool already) but actually because we can code around her it's enough for granulation, for delays, for convolution, pitch-shifting, time-streching, you could do a slap-back echo....

So; a insanely versatile little Ugen. Dan Trueman made LiSa and he hasn't gotten round yet to making a manual entry BUT there is a set of examples that takes you through the basics up to more advanced techniques and ends with "readme-2" which lists all of the member functions. I feel this is actually very good documentation, more elaborate then some of the Ugens which do have a manual entry and it's very practical. It's no secret that I'm a fan of the examples dir as a way to get started with anything in ChucK.

A fairly large section of these examples deals with techniques to avoid clicks. If that's a issue for you you may also like to look up my post to this list about using a SndBuf to record to LiSa while detecting and indexing positive zero-crossings which can be used as another technique to avoid clicks and other artefacts (with different strengths and downsides, as always).

That should be enough to get you started, I think? There is of course no substitute for simply spending a evening with her ;¬).

Yours,
Kas.

PS; in the interest of equal oportunities; Dyno is a guy, he's large and green and friendly but he likes to squash things. We need more Ugens with names that sound like individuals. This approach is 100% official and definitely *should* be used in university cources ;¬).