Midi Instrument Sync On Load

I realise that being hardware-orientated, this request will struggle more than most to get traction…but here goes.

Suppose I’ve got an epic project on the go which uses all four of my MIDI interfaces to control my JV-1010, my Nova, my Virus B and my Bass Station->SH101. Three of those synths are multitimbral - separate parts can be addressed on separate MIDI channels - and the JV-1010 in particular is at its most powerful when used with up to 16 different individual patches. Hooray. So far, so late-1990s.

But as far as I can tell, if you’ve got a massive stack of MIDI instruments in Renoise, each of which has a channel value, a bank value, a program value and very likely some linked MIDI-automation devices with CC values pointed at the synths, when you reload a project like this at a later date (and power up your hardware, which may have been switched off in the meantime), you have to ‘wiggle’ every single one of those values back and forth in order to send out that instruction and bring the hardware up to speed on what’s what.

So to assist me, and maybe others, in using Renoise as a hardcore hub for my virtual AND hardware instruments, please could we have some kind of global update/sync/snapshot/make-everything-better button that can be slapped when a project like this is loaded? I think it should be optional (like most niche but vastly useful requests) because you won’t always want it to happen - especially if you accidentally wanged a patch and don’t want to keep wanging it on every load.

I hope that in the future the MIDI section gets an overhaul so it can incorporate something similar to Cakewalk’s INS definition malarkey (basically a big text file containing things like RPNs, NRPS, default patch names - which you can change and use as a simple but lifesaving reference tool, bank values and the like), but in the meantime this snapshot feature would be a very practical help.

(Maybe snapshot isn’t the proper term for this - I know a lot of my controller equipment, like my Novation X-Station, has snapshot functionality, but I’ve never investigated what this is. Anyway, single control devices talking to single hardware synths isn’t what I’m talking about; I mean Renoise handling everything like some kind of heroic everything-handling machine.)

All you have to do now is first plugging in your MIDI gear, then loading the song in Renoise. Loading the song should do a complete update of all used MIDI settings.

Of course a manual “update MIID snapshot” would not hurt. But in case you forgot plugging in your MIDI gear, reloading the song also does the trick now…

Damn, it worked! Either it didn’t work last night, or I didn’t test the problem properly…more likely the latter ;)

Cheers :D