Tool To Show Instrument Vol And Pan As Hex

Ok so I’m going to take the suggestion to build a tool (or mod renoise via the API if possible) to do this, but I’ve never gotten my feet wet w/ this aspect of renoise. I’ve gotten a good hold of Lua scripting after building a bunch of ctrlr panels (1 2 3), and although I find Lua to be a very logical and simple scripting language I’m without a doubt more of an artist than I am a programmer…

Would anyone mind pointing me in the right direction so i can set renoise to display panning and volume in hex as opposed to 50L-0 0-50R and -inf to 12.04db as it does in the instrument settings?

Contrary to the suggestion on the forum thread pasted at the beginning of this post I do not want to have to change any setting to display the vol/pan in inst settings as hex, I’d like this to be at-a-glance so I don’t need to change any values to get the hex readout.

thanks in advance!

You cannot change Renoise to display it in hex, but you could output a converted value in the status bar or in a separate GUI window. I think a separate window is the only option in this case, if you can live with that? This could show converted values for the selected instrument, and update them whenever changed.

(I am just telling what’s possible, so you won’t spend time trying to make something that’s not.)

If the formula device could have a more dynamic layout, one could have emulated this behavior with the formula device.
You can always create a stats-dialog that responds with notifiers for the current selected device and reflect the Hex values on-the fly when you are sliding the paramters in the selected device.
Not all values are translatable into hex though (percentages, decimals, dB etc)

If you are going to go for the route suggested by joule (a separate window displaying the values you need), the awesome create tool tool will get you started in no time. But I hope you knew about that absolutely essential aspect of toolery already. This will get you past the initial GUI hurdle.

As I see it, the main problems you need to solve regarding your tool are:

How to get a GUI window displayed
-This is solved by the create tool tool.
-This is however not to say that it’s worthless to study how this is done.

How to control what is displayed in the GUI

  • I suggest experimenting with the GUI part of the script of the default tool born from create tool tool

How to get the panning value of currently selected instrument (As I understand, you dropped the possibility of displaying volume value also?)
-The api documentation on Renoise.Song holds the answer to this one

How to translate the decimal 50L to 50R panning value into hex (scale of 00 to 80?) ?
-The aforementioned Renoise.Song -api part helps here
-This needs some math work.
-For the decimal to hex part, I’d go for lua’s inbuilt string.format -function

How to keep the GUI up to date, reflecting the possible changes on the values
-This is the very part that was the most hard for me to comprehend when delving into tools.
-Notifier is the key word here.
-If things get too weird on this aspect, take comfort on the notion that the updating part is not absolutely essential.

Hope this helps, and happy coding!

Thanks for the tips. Unfortunately my desire has been proven moot.

In the golden days of mod trackers, even if you had your sample panned to the right in the inst. settings, if you played that note in a pattern and assigned it a panning position in the panning column, the panning column would over-ride the instrument settings… allowing you to easily make a synth line sound like it was dancing from the left to right channel simply by giving every other instance of that note a new panning designation in the panning column…

since in renoise if you pan a sample to the right in inst settings there is nothing you can do in the pan column to get it to the left channel, my request is totally moot.

same goes for volume.

Thanks though!

cheers.