The question has been asked multiple times, but now the big guns (well… ableton…) has full MPE support, I thought it was a good time to ask if it was of the roadmap.
To be fair, reanoise does sorta work with mpe with a little midi mapping… however it has a very limited amount of simultaneous midi it can record.
So basically you can play crazy stuffs with the sampler… but it’ll only playback portions of it.
Are there plans to increase the automation recording abilities on renoise ? Maybe outside the tracker interface (like the rest of the automation)
I think even the more important reason to have mpe is polyphonic pitchbend.
We technically have the feature in the built in sampler because we can add slide, vibrato or arpeggios effects independently to each note instead of one single pitch bend controls the pitch globally.
If there is a way to map the note effect to the polyphonic pitch bend, we might able to unlock note effect to the vst with mpe support so that we can write more expressive melodies.
How would you conceptually solve the problem that mpe requires midi data per note? Currently, the pattern editor of Renoise does not support that, neither the automation.
This is actually a good question because after seeing your reply and brainstormed a little bit, I just find even if the solution works, they still have some kind of limitations.
The first Idea was to add a “MPE Mode” in the plugin view; by toggling the button, it tell the sequencer that the plugin can handle MPE data, so the next thing is to convert the FX data to MPE protocol to change the pitch information. However, this sacrifices the polyphonic note track because the FX are separated from the notes. For that limitation, you have to use multiple tracks for multiple independent events, but pointing to the same instance of the instrument.
Another idea is instead of adding MPE mode on the plugin view, the button is added on the each tracks of the pattern or mixers, telling that the track is in MPE mode that it will handle midi differently. Instead of all FX affecting all notes of the same track, the FX only affect to the relative note column; for example, first FX column only affect the first note, second FX column affect the second note, an so on. If the NOTE column is more than the FX column, only the first few columns are affected by the column; otherwise, the additional FX will apply to the first note again, then the second note, in a round robin manner. Nevertheless, this can be still problematic since user might confuse how FX columns works in MPE mode and I don’t think recording works for this idea, not to mention that the current 8 FX slots are not enough for all 12 notes.
Sadly, I am still a newbie in Renoise; I don’t have the same experience level like in SunVox which I can provide a really detailed proposal or using hacky ways to solve a problem, so very likely, I might overlook some cool tricks or mechanisms to solve the problem, or end up with some non-sense. Let you guys judge, to see if the idea stands.