Hi Robin
The current recorders (which give you the looping behaviours) are due a major revisit in the near future. There are multiple reasons we plan to look to them afresh, the largest one being that they're not really compatible with the new Rig's. At present recorders are part of an instrument, there's one for each. In the old world where instruments are a permanent part of a setup this made sense. In the new world it really doesn't as the ability to record a Rig really ought to be outside of that Rig, especially once we get Rig's to be pluggable components so that they can be easily swapped out for a different sound. There are other reasons that we don't like the way recorders work at the moment, the main one being that it's hard to move takes between different instruments and even harder to have a general overview (arrange window style) of recorded takes.
Our current thinking on this is to change the way this all works by creating a new kind of recorder that can manage multiple 'channels'. Each channel corresponds to an input/output pair. Each input/ouput is connected to a 'tap agent' that sits in a signal flow and enables that signal flow to be both recorded, substituted and in the case of channelised signals to be played back in parallel. Rig gateways would support these 'tap' signals in an idiomatic way so that Rigs could be recorded.
In this way each recorder (and one could just have one in a setup) would also be able to support an overview of takes (perhaps via Stage as well as the keys on a harp) and manage where they were played back, giving access to the kinds of functionality that people are used to in DAW's.
This is quite a sweeping set of changes and I'm not sure that it really falls into the 'first EigenD project' kind of scope - it will probably have some implications in the broader system in the way that these kind of things tend to have. I think it'll be difficult and error prone even for someone very used to working inside EigenD.
I would probably suggest that if you're interested in looping behaviours specifically, create a new 'looper' agent and play with that. I think there's scope anyway for a nice, simpler 'looper pedal' type of agent, sometimes single purpose, specific programs can be much nice to use than 'do it all' things. And here are some great ideas in this thread already - I doubt that something like that would be superseded by improved recorders.
Adding audio to the current recorders wouldn't actually be that difficult btw. The problem is not adding it in, it's making it stream to disk. The reason they don't do it already is that we realised that as soon as we implemented it, people would use them to record long passages of sound, quite probably whole performances. The way the recorders work at the moment is that they store everything in memory, and this is only written or retrieved from disk when saving or loading the setup, so not only would audio recording use a lot of memory (which is a scarce resource) but it would also make loading setups potentially very slow. We could have put it in anyway, but our experience so far is that a feature that doesn't work as expected is worse than no feature at all in many ways, so we left it out and decided to wait until be could find the time to make recorders stream on and off of disk (as the samplers do) properly, which is a whole lot more difficult to get right, as we found out with the soundfont oscillators.
I think a pared down 'looper' agent would be a great thing, especially if it had some nice Belcanto support so that people could manipulate its playback intelligently with Talkers. Could even do audio, if you put a sensible (small) take time limit on it.
John
UK
