I’m just reminding myself how SuperCollider works.
Having just revised the ‘BufRd’ UGen, may I suggest that a future Sonic Pi should have a ‘sample scratch’ function able to take a sample and produce scratch noises from it. With high level arguments to allow flexibility.
If Sonic Pi is intended to introduce people to programming in a fun way, then I think this might help 
Couldn’t agree more! Would love to see a whole suite of synths like this make their way into Sonic Pi 
If I’m not being too forward, I am hoping that I will be able to contribute a few synths to a future version.
Not forward at all 
I’ve made it a pet project of mine to do the same, and that was even before I became part of the core team The more the merrier.
(The trouble with some of mine though is that they require a fair amount of changes/updates/additions to the Sonic Pi server code… so it’s been a bit slow going 
)
I wondered about being able to play soundfonts. That would most likely be mostly done in the Sonic Pi server itself, supported by a specially written Syndef. I believe. But, from what I understand of Sonic Pi and Sam’s ethos, I think it could work.
load_soundfonts “/User/pieater/soundfonts”
use_soundfont “Orchestral”, voice: “Violin”
play 60, sustain: 4
It’s been thought about already for sure. The only problem is that it is not a simple piece of work - Supercollider itself does not directly support soundfonts!
There are various posts floating around on the internet regarding bringing soundfonts to SC, starting from quite a ways back. Here’s the top two results for “Supercollider soundfonts”:
https://sc-users.bham.ac.narkive.com/AbDMqkZY/accessing-soundfont-data-in-sc
I was thinking about sound fonts, and I wondered if it would be best to do it in the Sonic Pi server, with the only extra supercollider bit being a new sample playing synthdef with suitable looping etc. capability to play a sample from a font.
Just thinking about this. I may have suspiciously taught myself to program in Ruby a bit, but only by doing a quick online course. I’ll see. I don’t want to sign onto anything that I then can’t deliver, and think up-skilling myself on Supercollider will be the best way that I can contribute. In the long run.
As with many on this forum, I’m an educator, and have the pile of unfinished marking that ate Japan on my desk. So, nothing doing at the moment in terms of progress. But the other night when my brain was full of marking and it wasn’t working hours anyhow, I had a first look at scratching in general. This wasn’t in Sonic Pi as I’m having a first look by doing it in Max/MSP, an environment that I’m more familiar with. My first impression is that gestures that I thought would cause a scratching sound … didn’t . I need to research scratching more. Fortunately there are materials out there such as: This PhD thesis on scratching and this tutorial article