Yes sir, it’s new to the 3.1 beta of renoise.
For 3.0 I use different strategies.
First, either I set my midi keyboard to output CC instead of pitchbend signals, so I can map it in renoise to any slider, or I use the duplex keyboard tool which is able to translate pitchbend to a CC.
Then, theoretically, you can map you Bend wheel to the instrument macros, or a instr.midi device, to control pitch bends and also record to a automation graph.
There’s some downsides, though - renoise has some bad design or lacking features for this up to 3.0:
First is, CC in middle position, be it directly or via duplex tool, is 64 of 127, so it won’t be 0.5 or 50% of a slider, but 50,393700787% - a very crook number resulting in middle position to be slightly out of tune (brwah!!) - a thing I use a formula meta device for to correct the number range so 64 is in the middle. But when recording the bend wheel, it’s sometimes hard to edit, because middle position is such a crooked number and you often need to reset your bends to neutral position, so bummer.
Second is, when your keyboard sends too few values in time (like mine) you’ll have severe stepping in the bends, it sounds bad. I use the very same formula device that remaps the value range, to interpolate the values automatically, and I also up the tick and linespeed of the song, so I get smoother bends.
Third is, if you record your bend action to automation graph, there will only be one value recorded for each line. So it won’t sound very smooth like you played it. Use high tpl values, like 8 or 16, then it’s kind of ok. Using the interpolation modes (linear or curve) you can have smooth results again, but loosing detail, and you won’t need an interpolating formula device any more.
Lets all hope the devs will lend their ears to us, and make renoise more pitch-bend friendly in some future versions. I’ve already heard other than pitchbend being usable as a macro it isn’t that much better in 3.1? Bah…