the way loops follow the chords is cool, but there is still the fact that a major chord remains a major chord, and it can never become a minor or any other chord. so how about this idea:

It would be cool if we could create a subdirectory of the loops dir, and fill it with all the snippets for one instrument. In this directory one could have a C.wav, Cm.wav, C7.wav, CMaj.wav or any other valid PG chord name,(named in the same way as on the chord sheet.)

Then instead of loading a single loop, there could be an option to apply/reference the whole directory to a track. Then for each chord change, if a snippet by the same name existed in the directory, it would be loaded into all the spaces for that chord.

To my knowledge, NOBODY else implements loops in this way. It would be consistent with the idea of building proprietary features on the existing foundation. It would also add quite a bit of flexibility to loops while making them even more compatible with the standard chord paradigm we already know how to use.

Cool idea

I love it, wonder what that would take?

I can see the folks at PG sitting in a meeting sayin' Hhmmm how can we make .....

I've got a SoundFont with up/down/mute strums. It's mapped along the lines of C3=I downstrum, C4 = I upstrum, C5 = I mute, D3 = ii downstrum, etc. So it's relatively easy to transpose a song by changing the instrument from C Major Guitar to F Major Guitar. Of course, things break down when you need strums that aren't diatonic to the key, but it does a pretty good job.

Samples work pretty well for strummed guitar, bass and drum. That is, instruments which have an initial attack, but don't "shape" their sound. Some instruments work pretty well (flute, orchestral woodwinds) with sample-based versions, and I could see PG Music potentially building an "all in one" solution along those lines. But for something like a fiddle, sax or trumpet the articulation becomes a lot more important.

Some sound libraries are now going with phrases instead of individual samples. So if you're playing a run of eighth notes, it'll try to find a phrase that contains that particular type of run, and transpose it if necessary, splicing together various phrases into a final output. That way, not only do you get the individual note played with the correct articulation, but you also get a plausible connection between the notes. Think of it as similar to RealTracks, but at a much more microscopic phrase level - note to note.

It's a trade-off. RealTracks don't give the same level of control as a sample-based library, but a sample-based library quickly becomes huge, especially with the myriad of articulations that are available for some instruments (like the violin).