Features to prioritize

[minosimo]

Hey, great work on Drum Machine. I appreciate the simplicity as anything music related can rapidly spiral into feature creep. With a few changes, I can imagine two use cases:

1. To make a beat, while jamming along with a live instrument or a synth in another application.
2. To iterate on ideas, exporting loops for use later in a DAW.

The changes I think would best serve those use cases:

• Export to audio
• Option for longer pattern length. 32 steps is probably the minimum for making a loop that could be used in a musical context without feeling overly repetitive. 64 would be better.
• Swappable kit pieces to shape the sound - either with a fixed number of lanes with one lane for each instrument type, or adding the ability to add and remove an arbitrary number of instruments.
• Preset dropdown to swap all kit pieces at once. Typical selections like Rock, Funk, Pop, Techno.
• Time signature - a simple toggle between 3/4 and 4/4 would be enough I think.

I would like to contribute sounds especially, but wanted to check if a PR would fit into your plan and direction for the application.

[minosimo]

An additional thought: how cool would it be if a GNOME release video were made with Drum Machine.

For that we'd need the addition of multisamples with randomization/rr behavior, and velocity as well. Here comes the feature creep :)

[Revisto]

Hahaha, that would be so cool, I love the idea, it's so interesting.

[minosimo]

It looks like FreeHive still do the videos, and we have Caroline Henriksen to thank for their style.

[Revisto]

Thanks so much @minosimo for the detailed feedback. I really appreciate it. I'm definitely open to making the Drum Machine better and adding more features to it. I agree with the ideas you mentioned and I believe there are the prioritized ones too.
I'm going to make new issues based on your suggestions and add priority tags to them.

[Revisto]

I've created new issues, would love to have your opinion on them and also make sure to open new issues if I haven't already.
Thank you for your time and interest @minosimo.

[hans-codes]

Hey @Revisto, I'd like to implement one of these features mentioned in this discussion or in this issue Undo and redo. Do you have any preference on which feature I should start? Have you started working on any of these? I'd like to try working on an undo/redo feature.

[Revisto]

Hi @xeserom, I really appreciate your interest in working on the Drum Machine. It's best to start with whichever you like the most. I'm not currently working on the issues, if you want to start working on any of those, please make sure to announce it on the issue so other people notice you're working on it.

[twigsdw]

Different time signatures would be brilliant.

How difficult would MIDI out be? To control hardware drum machines from this very nifty bit of software.