i’ve very new on here but took it upon myself to search this forum for arguments about beat slicing. i’m sure its been discussed many times before but i couldnt find any threads to comment on so i’ve started a new one hope no one minds.
for the kind of stuff i like to do in renoise and considering how much my work flow has improved since using it i think beat slicing would be the last word in prolific work flow, so much so that i;m surprised it doesnt do it already.
renoise offers so many ways to program breaks, more than i have seen in most programs (with the except of perhaps ableton) and more than i am going to go into detail about. i am aware that one can use the editor to cut up breaks into bits and generate a drum kit, and using the snapping mode makes this easier, but surely taking a leaf out of abletons book and having a option to “slice audio in to 4th notes, 8th notes, 16th notes” etc would increase renoise’s already massive workflow by god knows how much.
like i say, apologies if this is an old arguement amongst more seasoned users, but considering the amount of programming i have done since i bought renoise two weeks ago i really feel that those extra 10/15/20mins could be cut out if i could slice audio to measures or peaks.
thanks for your indulgence, now please feel free to criticize.
rave on
ned
(ps, either this is implented or i hassle albeton to introduce step time editor or tracker, and they wont like that )
yeah ive seen that video but in my opinion doing that way still takes a long time when it could be quicker, especially if your using lots of breaks. you could just import a loop of 4 breaks spread over 16 bars or 32bars or whatever, and slicing them into 4ths or 8ths using the editor would take such a long time when it would be good to “slice audio to x notes and generate drum kit” the time saved would be a lot.
then once you have your breaks sliced say to 4th notes for example, you set your step to 4 and off you go.
selecting parts in a sample, ctrl+x (=cut), then ctrl+v(=paste) into empty sample slot works pretty fast for me
But, yeah…seeing this in automated format would be cool, and would save some time. So I don’t mind seeing it…there have been plenty of threads about this tho…
slicing in snapped 4ths,8ths…256ths is cool, but with a lot of live drummed / badly programmed or organic stuff you’ll still end up reworking/cutting off gaps in all the sliced bits-> meaning about just the same time as manual cutting.
I think for long samples transient/amplitude detection is a must when slicing.
That is only if you don’t know the BPM of your sequence, if you do know it or you can always figure it out, you can just adjust the song-tempo to the beat bpm and use the beatsnapping mode.
But as Jonas already said, this does not work out for organic or human played (and recorded) stuff. A function that detects peaks might do the trick a lot better on these types of sequences as well, but if the sequence is way too crowded with data, this can turn out wrong as well.
I like how Zero X Beatquantizer handles the transient detection on audio files. Like in some gating plugins, you set a threshold level that sort of like ‘scans’ the sample for amplitude peaks. This is shown visually.
You see two lines, one starts at the top, one at the bottom when the knob ‘threshold’ is at the maximum level of 0.00 dB. When you drag the knob from right to left, both lines move towards the middle (0 dc offset(= -60.00 dB). Every time a relatively loud peak is found, a slicemarker is placed.
You can do lots more in the app, for example setting the sensitivity / minimum slice duration etc. Dunno if these scanning algorithms are well published and known, bet taktik could cook something adequate and pwntatstic
Is that supposed.to read “and NOT use the beatsnapping mode”?
If yes: BPM is useless! Nothing (interesting) ever is 100BPM or even 100.453 BPM, it’s more like 100.345789374589374, and Renoise tempo is often not granular enough to exactly hit that. The whole point of beatsync (to me) is that you can change the speed and don’t have to re-tune all beatsynced samples… fiddling around with song speed and fine-tuning is soooo FT2… yes,I’ll do it as long as have to, I just wish I hadn’t to!
If no: You can not use beatsnapping mode for long samples, except at low speeds, because 512 lines simply isn’t enough. I’m regularly hitting the 512 limit and I see no reason for it to exist. It’s not even stored in hex anyway, so if it gets bumped to a mere 4096 I’ll cry
For the part where 100 BPM is not exactly 100BPM but anything several digits above or beyond it:there are hardly decent slicers that use snap-points to cut that granular, but when using the line-sync mode for the sample, the accuracy is not a point of discussion here because Renoise ain’t any more granular using the sync-option than you would changing the song-bpm.
What i meanted is that if the sample-sync doesn’t cut it because 512 lines is too short for your sample-length, then changing the song-bpm (and disabling the sync-option!) is the only thing that estimates proper beat-slice devisions on the beat ruler and the snapping mode allows you to cut them at the reasonable points.
Precise? no, certainly not at recorded human performance but indeed not always with automated sequences
either. This also supplies you the perfection of electric and digital equipment that isn’t that far precise s you’ld wish for, but that is a thing you have to live with or an automated slicer that slices based upon analyzed peaks.
The beat slicing issue is twofold IMO. First there is the transient detection and ‘slicing’, then there is the sequenced data or groove maintenance. Personally, I find reprograming breaks equally as tedious as chopping; it just kills my flow. Keeping this sequenced data from breaks may be a problem because it would have to be automatically quantised to land on tick lines. This would seem very unintuitive to new users and may bother everyone else. So, perhaps we will have to wait to see if Renoise loses its ticks first…
I disagree. Even if it’s not perfect, I’d rather have get Renoise as close as it can by ticking a checkbox instead of fiddling around with speed and finetuning and never knowing how close to the optimum I am (not that I’m that obsessed with it, as long as it sounds good, but it’s still the kind of manual task that needn’t be manual). And that’s not even talking about “changing the speed nilly-willy”.
Is there a reason for the 512 limit? Then again this is a total hijack sorry…
Yes there is a reason and that is that the maximum pattern size can only stretch as far as 512 lines.
There are other ways to figure out the tempo of the sample, like using the metronome as a sync method?
I agree there is lots of room for improvement in Renoise also on this area, for now there are no better options but they are not as limited as the sync option.
)
