This one works pretty well within the design I think. For over a decade people have been wanting multi-song support, usually with tabs etc.
How about the ability to load a song into a track?
It would basically become what Photoshop calls a Smart Object, or in After Effects a Pre-Comp. It’s a whole ass song on it’s own, but delivered inside a track (a new track type would be required but that’s not a huge stretch).
You could start writing from scratch inside it, without the constraints that a phrase has with instruments and effect device chains. Put your beat in it’s own song. All 12 tracks of it, without cluttering the main song. Put your strings section there. Your sprawling live recorded piano that looks crap across way too many channels and isn’t human readable - but sounds great.
But what might be best - load another song. There it is. There’s the combo.
Load up that beat you made and just put it in your current song etc. No more endless copy pasting.
Plus - it’s a track in your song - it just renders along with everything else unless you mute it.
I know everyone has ideas and complaints about all sorts of things, but I just wanted to try and be proactive and share what I think is a good idea. Not looking for feedback - I’m not a Renoise dev, it’s not up to me what goes in the application, so don’t roast me.
Yes, why not, but it’s another CPU and coding load. You can render the song as wav/mp3, load in sampler, activate auto follow, map to c4, insert C4 note at the start of new song. Set new projects BPM to the rendered songs BPM or multiples of it. Build new song around that.
I know, there limit’s, you can not edit the old song, have to render anew, etc etc
Well, yes and no. It doesn’t have to be another CPU load. The output would already be rendered as one audio stream on the sub-song track. You would hear it as mixed within the ss-track but not be directly able to edit it without opening it. This is exactly the workflow of a Smart Object in PS. But that whole thing is devs only, I couldn’t say exactly how it would work under the hood, only the desired result.
Rendering and timing bpm etc is fine, we all do it right now, but it’s not composing, it’s just a technical chore. I’m simply looking for ways to be more modular and creative on the fly. Saving a track or a pattern here and there (as a song) and loading it into a track of it’s own and then be editable if you click inside - that’s pure progress. You can’t deny that.
I have been looking into exporting and loading multiple tracks including required instruments fx automation ect via the tools API. Basically I want to be able to copy and paste tracks from one song to another sort of like phrases but with all of the track data. Is that what you are after? From what I can tell you have to basically save the song(or parts of), then re populate tracks in the current song. Unlike a smart object it then becomes a completely new instance but you have the original to load from.
This goes against the grain a bit workflow wise but seemed possible. Anyway I didnt get that far into it but am keen to give it another crack.