big concern about chuck envelopes

[majutsu]

i might be missing something, but i've been playing with chuck today, making synths. I can only see to ugens for envelopes: envelope (a linear ramp) chucK native, and ADSR (the stk import). Is this correct? Here is a list from the wiki regarding the ugens:

standard ChucK unit generators (so far)
dac adc blackhole gain noise impulse step halfrect fullrect zerox delayp sndbuf
phasor sinosc pulseosc sqrosc triosc sawosc netout netin
mix2 pan2
STK unit generators in ChucK (so far)

StkInstrument BandedWG BlowBotl BlowHole Bowed Brass Clarinet Flute Mandolin ModalBar Moog Saxofony Shakers Sitar StifKarp VoicForm FM BeeThree FMVoices HevyMetl PercFlut Rhodey TubeBell Wurley Delay DelayA DelayL Echo Envelope ADSR BiQuad Filter OnePole TwoPole OneZero TwoZero PoleZero JCRev NRev PRCRev Chorus Modulate PitShift SubNoise Blit BlitSaw BlitSquare WvIn WaveLoop WvOut

this is it. am i reading this right? this seems terribly limited? is there something i am missing. While chuck is useful for midi control, on the fly programming etc, it's not a very good modular synth if this is the limit of it's envelopes. real instruments have 20-30 breakpoints per envelope or more. many synths have 6 or 7 breakpoints. supercollider can input arrays for envelopes using env.new. tell me if i am missing something or not.

[Kassen]

True; the curent set of ugens is too small to be considered a extensive modular synth. There should be more.

However, note that "envelope" is just a ramp and you should be able to repeatedly set "target" and "time" resulting in a multisegment envelope if I read the doc right. Maybe the plan is to chain up a few of them, I didn't try that one yet.

[ge]

Hi!

Kassen is totally right. We need more UGen's in ChucK. Certainly, many more are coming. Discussion on this forum has already prompted us chuck devs to priority-boost higher-level, commonly used things such as LP/BP filters that are more controllable out of the box (instead of having to deal with filter coefficients all the time). A better envelope (or at least better documentation or helper classes in ChucK) seems really good too.

In the meantime, as Kassen pointed out, it's possible to control the Envelope over time to achieve arbitrarily complex envelopes (at least linear ones) in ChucK, given that you can advance time by arbitrarily small increments, and things are sample-precise. The code might be a bit cumbersome depending on your needs, so maybe encapsulation in a class might help.

We will look into new ugens for the next release. ChucK on.

[majutsu]

ge, you rock. very informative answer. i like your work and your sense of humor. i actually posted this question to the list serve to see if someone has already coded a complex envelope for a bell or whatever. i would like to see the hp/lp as you mentioned too. very good stuff!