Loop Safety and Table Safety

Loop Safety and Table Safety

FWG can deliberately create discontinuous, nearly silent, collapsed, or extreme material. Two different safety systems help you deal with that without pretending every unusual sound is an error.

• Loop Safety warns that the selected render geometry/settings may be awkward for looping or wavetable use.
• Table Safety prevents collapsed/non-finite generated tables from turning into numerical garbage or explosive normalisation.

A warning is not automatically a bug, and neither system exists to make every sound smooth. Morph and Explorer show Loop Safety notices near their export controls; Table Safety reports appear in the workspace whose generated table required substitution.

Loop Safety — what the warning means

🎹 Loop Safety is practical guidance. It may flag:

• duration/cycle geometry unlikely to loop cleanly;
• sub-cycle output that may capture an unrepresentative fragment;
• target wavetable geometry that may slice incorrectly;
• combinations worth auditioning before a long export.

Read the finding, then decide whether the behaviour is intentional for the job. Hits, noise, and transitions often do not need loop-friendly geometry at all.

For strict wavetable work, see Creating Wavetables.

Table Safety — what the fallback means

🔧 Some legal parameter combinations produce an unusable generated table: non-finite values, all-DC, floating-point dust, or too little meaningful AC structure for ordinary normalisation.

Rather than let such a table explode numerically, FWG resolves the owning structural stream to a deterministic standby.

If you see a Table Safety report:

1. audition the result;
2. decide whether the substitution matters audibly;
3. inspect narrow Windows/extreme generator settings if collapse was unexpected;
4. change the patch only if the result is not useful.

Broad random search can legitimately encounter collapse.

The deterministic initial fallback

🔧 Every fresh structural stream begins with a deterministic square-wave standby. An invalid state reached immediately after a structural replacement—or before a render owner has produced any meaningful table—can therefore appear as a square rather than silence or random garbage.

It is a safety substitute, not a hidden Generator preset.

Continuous editing, structural changes, and evolving renders

Continuous endpoint edits

🔧 During continuous endpoint edits such as a generator control or Window drag, live preview/audition retains one bounded previous-valid table for that endpoint. If the next coordinate collapses, FWG can temporarily report using previous valid table. A later meaningful coordinate replaces the standby.

This prevents one mathematically dead slider coordinate from inserting an unrelated square into an otherwise continuous gesture. The standby is runtime state and is not stored in patch/JSON.

Structural changes

🔧 Structural replacement clears the previous-valid standby first. Examples include Generator Family/variant, routing, Wavetable Type, preset/Reset, patch replacement, and whole-Drawn actions such as Copy / Reset / Clear / Undo / Import.

If the new structure collapses, FWG reports using safety square rather than borrowing a waveform from the structure it replaced. Pointer drawing remains a continuous edit and can retain previous-valid during the gesture.

Audition and render trajectories

🔧 Scanning/Morph audition and rendering keep bounded START, END, and Morph standbys inside the traversal. Invalid-after-valid uses the previous valid table for that owner; invalid-before-valid uses the safety square.

A new render starts with fresh standbys. Previous-valid state is not persistent patch history and is never serialised.

START, END, and Morph have separate standby histories

🔧 START, END, and Morph output own separate bounded standby slots. A meaningful candidate updates only its own stream; a collapsed candidate reuses that stream's current standby.

These histories are local to the current audition/render and do not leak from an old batch into a new one.

What exported Table Safety evidence counts

🔧 Public table_safety metadata, rendered notes, and Bulk/Explorer aggregate counts describe resolved structural substitutions, not every temporary helper failure.

A structural result finally resolved as previous valid table is reported once as previous-valid. Invalid-before-valid is reported once as safety square. Internal helper detections are not double-counted as additional delivered corrections.

Drawn and Table Safety

⚠️ Malformed authoritative Drawn data is an import validation failure, not something Table Safety repairs. A schema-13 patch that actually consumes Drawn must provide valid Drawn data; FWG does not silently substitute the built-in sine.

A valid Drawn waveform may still be silent, DC, or extreme because the user authored it that way. Table Safety then handles the generated structural output under the normal rules.

See Drawn Waveform.

Windows and flat regions

🎹 Very narrow Windows stretch a small selected region across the complete cycle. Equal Start/End selects one position and can therefore collapse the effective oscillator table.

That may be intentional. If not, widen or move the Window and audition again.

See Source and Result Windows.

Cycle coherence is a different concept

Table Safety asks whether a structural table is numerically meaningful enough to use.

Phase/cycle coherence asks whether changing tables align usefully over time.

A safe table can make a poor wavetable transition. A phase-coherent table can be intentionally harsh. See Phase-Coherent Mode.

MPC Mode

MPC Wavetable Mode adds mechanical file/layout rules. It does not replace musical audition or Table Safety interpretation.

A package can be mechanically valid and musically poor; an aggressive table can be musically useful if the hardware interprets it as intended.

Technical note: bounded safety state

🔧 The implementation uses only bounded structural START/END/Morph standby slots; Playground reuses START for its single endpoint stream. Live preview can retain the relevant slot across continuous edits, while each new render receives fresh slots. Intermediate helper tables do not become standbys merely because they were calculated first.

Scanning derived caches store candidates rather than global historical fallback state; substitution belongs to the owning traversal. Previous previews, batches, or diagnostics therefore cannot become hidden input to later renders.

Related pages

• Troubleshooting
• Source and Result Windows
• Render and Export Settings
• Phase-Coherent Mode

Effective-structure standby ownership

🔧 Live previous-valid state is invalidated by changes to the effective table-producing structure, not by every selector that merely looks structural in the UI.

Important literal-Drawn fast paths are:

• Wavetable Type 0 with Input 1 = Drawn;
• Wavetable Type 1 with Input 2 = Drawn.

Those routes do not evaluate the generator pair, so changing an inaudible Generator Family/Variant or Scanning recipe does not clear their previous-valid standby. Whole-Drawn replacement remains structural; generated/combined routes still invalidate when their consumed structure changes.