Lidnariq, these samples might prove invaluable to me.
After trying them on, building more a quite well rounded instrument with a decent tri volume in under or about 1k seems very doable, which isn't all that costly. Some ranges and some few notes will have to go, but that's not too much of a problem.
A side effect: The longer samples, if not looped, can act as short notes.
And all samples can be used as note stops in the same way.
Silencing a looped note will make a hard pop, so they're best for drones as-is, but just playing a one-shot sample won't pop.
rainwarrior wrote:
BTW the one game that used looped 17-byte DPCM for a pitched instrument (The Immortal, Rob Hubbard) just took the "one semitone down is close enough to 16/17" approach
Cool to hear a song from the commercial era to use it!
I'm not too worried about some of the notes being a little honkey tonk (though some of the upper notes in my sample are unusable of course), as long as they don't play solo. The beating swell of the detune can sometimes act complementary, especially for the delta artifacts which go in and out. But the detuning can also get old quickly, so lidnariqs triangle library will be useful in that regard too.
Something i found interesting is that there seems to be some cancellation based, airy movement happening in between the alias noises of both the tri channel and the DPCM, presumably because the delta artifacts' phases clash asynchronously. You can control how much by using samples with more or less evident artifacts. It sort of reminds me of a rotary electric organ.