safrosch thanks a lot for this suggestion and a good new year to you, too!
LoopA works with every clip tightly locked into the timing of each other - the playback position for every of its 36 clips is deterministic and the LoopA sequencer calculates it by looking at the current playback time index. This allows to record any clip “on top” of other clips that are currently being played back and it guarantees, that (independent of the playback circumstances in the future) the newly recorded notes will “land” at the same timepoint as the notes played back in the other clips during recording - this would be impossible to do with “launched clips”, that could start at any full measure - you could potentially not reconstruct the clips that were at play during your recording of a new clip, as their launch times were random.
If scene changes would re-launch clips at time index 0, then a new problem would occur: say you have a clip of length 64 in both scenes “A” and “B”, with the “B” scene clip only being a variation of the “A” scene clip, e.g. one is in c-major, the other in c-minor - now there’s the very valid usecase that people would want to switch between them at every measure (time index 16, 32, 48 …) without restarting the clip. This is what LoopA implements - as it is a looping device, you could consider it as 36 tape loops that are started the moment the sequencer engine is started and you just switch between them, also arbitrarily as also partial scene switches are possible.
Another reason for all clip timings being linked is a requirement of the beatloop feature, which allows random scanning through time - from any time index, a clip playback position must be determined - if a clip could be “launched” at any arbitrary time, this would not be easy to calculate.
Hopefully this makes sense, it’s a complex topic.
Best regards,
Peter
