Good Software for DSP

Does anyone know of DAWs that have good workflows for sound design? Renoise is great, but it’s main flaw is that jumping between sends and tracks is a bit of hassle, and I end up just creating multiple instances of a VST, or just sampling it, and then make a new track.

Either way, what I guess I’m looking for is a DAW that allows for complex effect chain routing like SunVox or Audiomulch. Audiomulch doesn’t do sequencing, and SunVox doesn’t do VSTs, which is a bit of a write off for me. Neither seem to have very usable interfaces, although that might just be me. What other options are available?

edit: just remembered IL midihost modular. This would be perfect if renoise had audio routing to VSTs

It’s not going to have the pretty lines and boxes like Sunvox, but the minihost you mentioned plus Reaper might do for you. You can do sends and receives, pre and post fader and effects. You can also setup multiple channels for each track for more complex routing. One of the things this allows you to do is use the JS send device to do a mid-fx chain Renoise style send. Reaper also has a built in Vocoder that you use by giving your vocoding track 4 channels and then sending it 2 stereo signals from other tracks to vocode. Reaper also has groups and nested groups like Renoise.

Maybe Radium? That’s what came to mind immediately when you mentioned SunVox.

Thanks guys. I forgot to try Radium out, it looks interesting. The Reaper thing could work too. Whenever Redux comes out it could be a powerful combo. :yeah:

The patcher thing in FL Studio looks pretty similar to Sunvox last time I checked.

Here’s a video if you don’t know what I’m talking about.

Does anyone know of DAWs that have good workflows for sound design? Renoise is great, but it’s main flaw is that jumping between sends and tracks is a bit of hassle, and I end up just creating multiple instances of a VST, or just sampling it, and then make a new track.

Really it depends on what tools, programs you combine, workflow your familiar with, effort you want to put in it for the output you want to achieve, realtime vs offline or a combination of the two. Renoise combined with the CDP tool for me is the ultimate sounddesign sketch package. I like generating sounds offline through the tool, and automate vst’s/use pattern commands on top when sequencing in the pattern editor. When a track or song is done it can be freezed and mangled in Renoise or exported and manipulated further in an external wave editor if necessary, I do this for more experimental output, like;

http://soundcloud.com/plugexpert/richard-jonas-dubbelspel

Out of the scope of the current Renoise roadmap I think, but it could be so much better if the track freezing would be native and pimped with more features. Be able to define a to-be freezed section in the pattern editor, sequence-list and pattern-matrix, so the note events in the pattern editor will get replaced with the rendered results. Optionally these rendered results would not just be ‘long’ rendered autoseeked recordings, but could be split up into separate sampled instruments placed at exact spot of the initial note-events. This would open up so much sounddesign possibilities, quickly replacing automated sections with rendered equivalents, but auto-sliced (either on the transient, or in settable divisions) and placed accordingly just like Dblue’s slices to pattern tool :-). Because of the potential song-size increase through this, generation of a lot of new data, this would only be viable if Renoise would store, reference the samples outside of the songfile.

keeps on dreaming

Thanks guys. I forgot to try Radium out, it looks interesting. The Reaper thing could work too. Whenever Redux comes out it could be a powerful combo. :yeah:

Yeah I’m really looking forward to Redux. As much as I love tracking, I want to move away from step sequencing and more towards live recording. But I don’t want to give up the sampler, and there’s a bunch of .xrni’s I want to use still. I’ll probably be using Reaper like 95% of the time once Redux is released.