Hello,
One of the most powerful features in the polyend tracker is the fill feature. It offers a quick yet powerful tool for populating pattern information in useful or surprising ways. I find myself really missing it when using renoise.
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Seems like the phrases feature but more prescriptive? Could this be done with a bunch of premade phrases? I can’t tell from the video what kind of patterns it’s adding.
I thought it was just for adding drum fills at the end of patterns which I find kinda tedious and never do with as much care as I should… I would love to have a bank of premade drum fills to throw on the last couple bars of a pattern for some variety.
I bet you could either come very close, or totally surpass it…
Not familiar with the polyend’s capabilities, but phrase user presets are so powerful and quick. The randomization and density parameters might be a little trickier to substitute, but I bet it could be done with a little thought and effort
@Gfunk have you experimented much with phrases and/or saving your own phrase presets?
After rewatching the video, i think one could write a tool to add this kind of functionality. Might be a good coding project if someone wants to take it on…
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The polyend’s capabilities are listed in the link to the manual I provided after the video. I just started renoise so maybe I’m missing something with phrases, which I haven’t learned yet. Still, there’s already a simple fill function in renoise I saw somewhere?, and it could really use some expanding with these types of capabilities.
For filling options you have:
- continuous paste.
- Use of phrases. It is necessary for the user to build phrases. That’s what they are for. They can then be used in countless projects. You know, you insert a note and the phrase plays.
- Lua tools that offer you randomization of notes. Also randomization of parameters. A tool to randomize notes or any value is very easy to build…
- Probability effect. In fact, some features that Renoise had for a long time have been copied in some form in newer versions of other DAWs. But Renoise is already well stocked.
From my point of view, there is a lack of a Renoise website or in the Forums that allows sharing more native Renoise content in a clearly classified way, such as:
- Libraries (does anyone build Renoise libraries?).
- XRNI instruments elaborated.
- XRNZ Phrases.
- Other formats for DPS effects, etc…
Renoise already has several packages installed, both for instruments and for phrases or libraries. Are you using all of this?
It is really difficult for the software to “guess” what the user needs. I think more user-made content is missing, but very well graded. That the user who visits the forums knows where to go.
Maybe I’m missing something, but where are the unique links to download classified content that the user creates and shares? It gives me the feeling that we are losing great power within the community, for not having a very clear corner to share.
Instead of looking so far outside, it might be an advantage to study Renoise more in depth.
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I agree baked-in fill options in Renoise like in the polyend tracker would be great to have, think I’ve suggested it before somewhere on this forum. I think the current advanced edit tab would be a great candidate for pimping these features into. Right now, similar functionality like from the polyend are scattered across different tools & native functions.
Perhaps someone with time and mastery of the fill powers in the polyend can give an overview of why it is so powerful and/or what they need.
Perhaps too advanced and also more of a realtime manipulation thing while it can do offline processing, but this tool provides cool data manipulation tricks; xStream | Renoise
The issue of dealing with these issues with lua tools is somewhat complex. The difficulty lies in offering functions that are very user-friendly. As soon as a tool is complicated to control, it ceases to be a useful tool for the majority.
I don’t really know what polyend is capable of. Depending on your hardware form factor, it should offer plenty of easy-to-control options, well thought out to be easy and straightforward. Therein lies the difficulty in creating functions.
Stream is a good example of a complicated tool. But I am sure that the API + Lua, well treated, can offer much more than what Polyend can offer. Renoise + API + Lua is tremendously powerful. You can pretty much do anything you want with the data.
Leaving aside the Lua language, the problem is the same as always. The vast majority of users do not know the API to use it. They look at other things from other formats, like Polyend, or Radium and are surprised, when Renoise can have so much more thanks to the tools.
By the way, I find Polyend beastly. If someone gave me this device, I’m sure I could integrate anything from it into Renoise using tools, even more things.
Currently, there is no more powerful tracker than Renoise + a computer. There isn’t.
- Polyend Tracker costs about 530 €
- Renoise costs about 86 €. Do you have 444 € left for a laptop or a modest tower computer?
The matter is interesting.
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I like this idea. Would be great to be able to fill notes with a step value and probability value from any of the available scales for a given selection. Would make borrowing from other modes really easy when writing melodic lines, not to mention being a great idea generator.
Yes I feel like there was more of a space for sharing of user-created content before we switched to this new (very nice BTW) Discourse-based forum. I agree it’s a loss.
New users have no choice BUT to study Renoise in depth to develop our own ways of getting it to do cool things. It’s a open-world playground of audio tools that can be bewildering for newbies. I think it would be much more appealing and friendly if it had some more “opinionated” features that help you achieve common tasks quickly.
There are many basic tasks that most electronic musicians do most of the time that, in Renoise, are mutli-step processes that you have to dig deep in the docs to grasp.
I think it would add a lot of value to Renoise if it came with a large(r) set of immediately useful arpeggio phrases, rhythm patterns, instrument presets, etc, that a new user can play through from a menu to generate ideas.
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I agree. AND, it sometimes takes people a while to even get to the use of phrases within renoise in the first place… Took me a number of years before I realized that they are so powerful. Now I use them for most instruments in one way or another. I think the more useful renoise video content there is out there, the quicker new ppl will learn. Seems like a lot of people learn via video tutorials these days, moreso than through RTFM
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Agreed and thanks for all your great videos, @slujr ! They’re definitely deeper and geekier than I usually get with Renoise but I always learn a lot. I’ve been wanting to start doing video tutorials for Renoise – maybe when the kids are a little older LOL
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That definitely helps!! Glad if you get something out of them. Definitely a noise geek here 
Been messing with xStream a little… you can definitely generate some content with it! kinda abstruse getting started, but seems quite powerful if you can wrap your noodle around it
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Why not starting a Renoise phrase competition, instead of the next mutant breaks or so?
The best ones will be chosen by the forum members using a poll and when some tool developers have a bit time left, they surely can even provide a quick and fast installer for them, which Taktik can simply include in the package.
This is of course not the same as the Polyend fills, but could force the future of the Renoise project and Taktik has more time for the development of the program. It also can assist beginners and support lazy producers like me with new ideas or even make the production process faster.
I mean - what have you got to loose? If your style is setting the roof on fire, it will be copied anyway.
This should be done with doofers, instruments and so on as well and could have a general effort on the community.
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Great idea! I’ve got a bunch of euclidian rhythms and polyrhythms to share…
I nominate @Lockdown to organize it 
Didn’t we used to have a community repository for patches on the old forum? Can that be a thing on this version of the forum somehow? Would be great for there to be a central clearinghouse here for sharing user generated presets, etc.
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I’m a lousy organizer as most adhd are. And I’m restricted in data volume and bandwith, like most germans. But I’ll try - as always.
Hopefully, that wasn’t sarcasm which should force me having a look at the tools and things site? 
Probably I`m too much a Hippie. Still believing sharing good work of the whole community could lead into the next wonderland.
sharing is good!
suppose we could always start a forum thread and just upload attachments under the data limit. Wouldn’t be so great form instruments with a lot of sample data, but would work well for a lot of other files
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I love this idea. I need to get in the habit of making phrases out of the patterns that I do repetitively. I think building up my own little library of the common moves I normally make is the first step in sharing them out.
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Love the sharing ideas. A Renoise user wiki or maybe even a GitHub repo could suffice for collecting reusable content. Plenty of ways to organize, maybe even too many. 
Regarding original topic: the Fill function on Polyend’s tracker is generative, not made from preset phrases. You guide an algorithm by configuring a set of parameters and then it writes some new unique data. As others noted, this is the domain of Renoise tools.
The only advantage Polyend has here is that they actually wrote a nice set of functions and made them immediately accessible to all users. I don’t think Renoise devs should bother cluttering up the main interface with something so opinionated as music generation, scales, etc. Being able to write or choose your own toolkit is much better. However, bundling a select set of tools with the main distribution might help new users realize the awesome power Renoise provides.
I just ordered the Polyend, even though I use and love Renoise, mainly for the things you can not do with the Lua tools: realtime wavetable and granular synthesis. This is where I would like to see some future development: native synthesis taking full advantage of the sampler core. Use one sample or audio source to control frequency or phase of another, jump around wave tables, etc. Synth/Sampler fusion is actually in tune with tracker tradition. Deflemask lets you control an FM sound generator using separate tracks per operator. Alien superpowers just with sine waves, and Renoise could do even better with its instruments.
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