Hey! Sorry that I haven't been so active with this project lately, been super busy with my grocery day job. Really appreciate the input, though.
I like your ideas. My original intent for this program was to make something that sort of blurred the line between music creation software and a musical composition in and of itself (in the same sort of spirit as John Cage's radio pieces) so I didn't put in a LOT of granular control, but the "change" button wouldn't be too hard to implement at all. Same with the crossfade, I'm not sure why I didn't add that in at the start. I GUESS you could make the argument that the glitchy loop clicks are part of the ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ, but at the same time it wouldn't hurt to have that as a parameter that can be dialed in to taste.
I wasn't even aware that the program was accessing the mic. That's probably a quirk of the Max/MSP engine it runs in, I'll see if there's any way to disable it within the patch.
I'll have to do some thinking about the "normalize each loop" part. Normalizing the input audio itself shouldn't be too hard, but every loop in the program is just a randomly selected chunk of that single audio buffer. It might be worth putting a compressor at the end of the signal chain?
I totally agree that the buttons SHOULD be lit up when active, I just didn't know how to really do that in Max? I'll have to see if there's a way to make a button object behave like a "toggle" (i.e. an on/off switch) instead of a "bang" (a triggered pulse).
As for the higher sample rate, if the input audio's sample rate is higher Max SHOULD be able to just automatically deal with it. I think the output is 44.1kHz by default, so a lot of the "crunchy" artifacts you hear are just the result of playing a 44.1kHz input file at a slower sample rate. If the input audio has a higher sample rate than that, you SHOULD hear less artifacts when slowing it down. Then again, I know that a lot of audio people work at 48kHz, but again, if the input audio is still at 44.1kHz, making the output sample rate 48kHz isn't going to do anything but make the output file bigger than it needs to be.