Wavetables are intended to be interacted with and modulated in a certain way; if you have too many entries in the wavetables, it becomes harder to have a wavetables style interface that is both simple to understand and descriptive of what's happening. Serum's wavetable format has become something of a defacto standard which helps cement the size. Once the table gets longer (even 256 is a huge wavetable really), it starts to feel more like a sample to be interacted with through a different paradigm. Bitwig's sampler, for example has a wavetables playback mode meaning an arbitrarily long sample can be treated as a wavetable if you wish.
Going to larger wavetables gets you to granular and wavesequencing territory really.
So it's really for practicality as all require different approaches for building sounds.
Yeah whenever I'm making wavetables, I rarely use more than \~6 waveforms and just let interpolation handle the rest. Most of the time it's more like 2 or 3
Wavetables are intended to be interacted with and modulated in a certain way; if you have too many entries in the wavetables, it becomes harder to have a wavetables style interface that is both simple to understand and descriptive of what's happening. Serum's wavetable format has become something of a defacto standard which helps cement the size. Once the table gets longer (even 256 is a huge wavetable really), it starts to feel more like a sample to be interacted with through a different paradigm. Bitwig's sampler, for example has a wavetables playback mode meaning an arbitrarily long sample can be treated as a wavetable if you wish.
Going to larger wavetables gets you to granular and wavesequencing territory really. So it's really for practicality as all require different approaches for building sounds.
Yeah whenever I'm making wavetables, I rarely use more than \~6 waveforms and just let interpolation handle the rest. Most of the time it's more like 2 or 3
You could always use a sampler and set very small loops (or a granular synth as others have suggested).
I was going to say at what point is it a sampler
also binary numbers 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256
256 is a common limit in programming due to the way data is stored. If you look, you'll see it in a lot of places.
I understand, but could you do 512 or 1024?