TimeSlice.get_audio()

[bmcfee]

In implementing a few remix hacks yesterday, I kept finding myself wanting to construct a new Audio object from a time slice. Currently, the only way to do this is to extract the waveform by get_samples() and then instantiate a new Audio object.

This is undesirable for a few reasons:

1. It's clunky
2. It triggers a full copy and re-analysis of the audio

1 is okay, but 2 is a deal breaker if you're extracting short clips (eg beats), which may be too short for certain analyses to make sense.

What do folks think about making a shortcut for this kind of operation that propagates features (and timings) from the source audio of a time slice? This way, we can also preserve things like beat timings within a sliced interval, which might come out differently if the interval is analyzed independently of the full track.

If we're careful about things, the audio buffer could also be shared between audio objects by slicing.

[tkell]

I like this idea. I am a bit leery of sharing audio buffers, as I can see some weird, wait-why-did-that-buffer-change things popping up.

Would this be a function of a TimeSlice? TimeSlice.to_audio(), or something?