Ableton Live As Rewire Master Controlling Renoise 2.5 Patterns?

Is it possible to program renoise pattern scheduling/triggering from within Ableton Live? I’m trying out the scenario of Ableton Live 8.1 as the rewire master and Renoise 2.5 beta as the rewire slave. It would be interesting if I could have clips in Live’s session view somehow controlling renoise 2.5 patterns.

I think if you would use MIDI Yoke to broadcast different channels to Renoise from within Live and simply map those channels, you can achieve a lot of things.

Thanks for that tip, vV. Since I’m on OS X, I’d have to use IAC. But I have no idea what to do once I have the virtual sync setup. I’m basically looking for either a way for another program like Live or Logic to trigger/program Renoise patterns or the other way around: Renoise controlling Live’s scenes or Logic’s timeline (I guess cue points in that case?). And I’m hoping this can be done without having to manually map beforehand.

For an example of an ideal situation, with NI Maschine you can set Maschine’s scenes to be controlled by program change messages or midi notes. So I can trigger Maschine’s scenes from within the Renoise pattern editor just by typing in a predetermined midi note that corresponds to the scene in Maschine. i.e. C-2 = Scene 1.

Well, I’m not an OSX hero, but playing around with MIDI for a while and using virtualisation, the basics is all about using channels and broadcasting the MIDI CC across those channels. I guess with the IAC driver it seems simply patching on the bus. The MIDI port-out is where you attach the Live controls to and the IAC bus port-in is what you assign to the MIDI in device in Renoise.
Then from there you simple click the map button in Renoise and fumble with the Live controllers to see if Renoise reads the CC message that the Live controller is sending.
Just keep the channels (port-numbers) equal on both sides (in- and out port) to be sure you are sending the CC messages on the same line.

So I played around with IAC while running renoise as rewire slave to Live and I was able to play midi notes in real-time from my midi keyboard to trigger the patterns in renoise after manually mapping the patterns in renoise. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work properly by recording those midi notes in a midi clip in the same track in Live and then having the different midi notes trigger the renoise patterns as the clip plays. Whenever the first note in the clip played, the renoise pattern would get stuck on the triggered pattern by stuttering/retriggering really fast until I stopped all clips in Live, almost as if renoise was expecting a note off command. Playing around with the length of each midi note seemed like it changed the behavior somewhat but I just couldn’t get it to work. I then tried mapping the actual clips in Live itself to the midi notes instead of recording the midi notes in the clip but renoise doesn’t seem to be responding at all that way.

Anyway, I’ve decided to give up on the idea of syncing Live’s session view clips/scenes to renoise patterns since it just adds yet another variable to keep track of. I’ve decided to just stick to the linear timeline view in Live when arranging with renoise since I realized that the order of renoise patterns sync with the different points of the linear timeline and allow you to skip around in both the linear timeline of a master sequencer or the patterns in renoise and still have both be synced.

No you are not done with experimenting yet…:

If you look in the preferences, you can toggle the “Separate edit and play positions” and push the pattern follow button (to turn it off):

Also the Audio preferences show a different option when Renoise is in slave mode, but it should be possible to have Renoise run independantly from the Master.

Yeah it works now. :w00t: Thanks vV. It’s working like I wanted to in session view. I did exactly as you suggested including changing the audio sync settings to Bar and BPM Sync.