If you’ve ever tried recording with a U87 in a control room, you can get shocking amounts of background noise - It picks up every car that goes past the studio - Usually not a problem as long as you get a nice hot level and a decent noise gate…
Must say, one thing I’ve not found much of in software is good quality expander/gates - I’m sure there must be some…
Of course, if you’re mixing native these days, there’s CD rom’s you can buy of low-level noise, recorded off old Neve desks, just to give digital recordings a touch of ambience and a little non-linearity…
I’d find a little record button so useful - I’d like it to start recording straight into the sample editor, whether your track’s playing or not, nothing fancy (although being able to record/monitor through a channel of VST’s would be a nice addition)…
So I could dial up a preset on a synth, press record, and record it in exactly as you would with a conventional sampler… Make quick patches… Even, route things through external fx units and resample quickly and easily…
Or, let’s say I wanted a live guitar line over a programmed beat - Press play on Renoise, arm the sample recorder, then start playing your guitar straight in…
A little manual trimming would fix any obvious latency issues…
Or, of course, just as a monitor - so you could play other synths/instruments/vocals straight into the computer for live use…
It’s all doable with software like Live! running in the background - But a little fiddly and inconvenient.
Yup, they both use these techniques. It is called “noise print” in the Sonic Foundry and “noise profile” in Waves.
Anyway, just as J Swift is saying, there are a lot of other sources to record than specifically voices/microphone. Personally I’ve most been thinking of tracking some short synthesizerloops (external synthesizers), then recording them and manipulating the pieces of that loop in ways you can only do with audio. Stuff like that would be much faster to do if you could record inside the program (or if you could record everytime in Sound Forge/ Audacity etc without any hassle).
As far as the vst-plugs that do recording: none of them should be voided in the registered edition, but who wants that if Renoise can render the whole thing clean?
About recording simultaneously while Renoise is running in general, this can probably only be fixed if there is going to be delay compensation and you can set higher latency responds so CPU load becomes less.
CPU load is one of the problems for your issue, another issue is Renoise does a lot of disk-swapping of it’s own in the background.
Picking a different harddrive for your recordings to put on may already make a big difference in that concept.
Raising latencies in Renoise and lowering GUI refresh rates can make another performance raise.
Another tip is to turn off tracks in Renoise you don’t specifically need to play to support your vocal (or other external equipment) recording which will save some more cpu cycles.
Your sample sync point will probably have to be set manually due to the high latency value you’ve used for it.
Also, ASIO drivers usually don’t like to be controlled by multiple hosts and in some cases (like i have with my soundcard) ASIO drivers don’t even like to coop with DirectSound simultaneously.
This problem cannot be fixed by any musical host, some can work with multiple audio devices if your system allows this, Renoise is unfortunately less nice to systems that has more than one audio-device enabled at the same time (also depending which audio cards).