"Black-Box" Custom Meta-Devices

Ideas & suggestions
1

This suggestion has been brought up before in other discussions (by Sunjammer IIRC), but it’s probably the number 1 feature I long for in Renoise, so I think it deserves another mention:

The most obvious ‘problem’ I run into when producing music in Renoise is clutter. Songs with many send tracks and long effect chains, although powerful and awesome, can quickly become cumbersome to work with.

For example: http://datassette.net/temp/royknoise.png
(This screenshot also shows just how bloody essential the mixer view is, btw)

I’m not sure how much of a pain in the arse it would be to develop, but a nice way to ‘clean up’ these kind of situations could work like this:

Say you have a multiband send going into 3 send tracks with different types of distortion - you have created native Multiband Distortion. That’s awesome, but if you want to re-use this in other songs you have to either save 3x DSP chains and 1 multiband send preset, or make a template song for it.

A better way to store this structure would be to wrap up those 3 tracks and 1 device into a single meta device, which you would then place inside a single send track - so we’re actually having a whole other track with 3 different send tracks actually contained WITHIN a send track inside Renoise - but these extra send tracks ‘inside the black box’ would not be addressable from anywhere else.

This device could contain any number of FX and send tracks, but appear in the Renoise Track DSP view as a single device, be isolated from other tracks elsewhere in Renoise, and with only the pertinent parameters that need automating exposed to Renoise automation and pattern commands via a user-definable GUI front-end.

For extra awesomeness, these type of devices could be saved into the Renoise DSP browser as custom ‘black box devices’ for re-use.

Anyone else think this would be ULTRA-MEGA?

2

@datassette:

What a great theme in the screenshot! Could you please upload the xml file?

3

This has been brought up before:
http://www.renoise.c…__fromsearch__1

Seems like this idea touches upon several different concepts, such as the custom device to present parameters, and track grouping to deliver routing.
I’m all for it, most of my tracks look even more complex than your screenshot, datassette. Would be great to clean up the mess and make things more reusable.

4

Ah yes. I knew this was pretty much what Sunjammer suggested. Should’ve done a search really, I just wanted to put it in my own words because I got all enthused thinking about it again. :)

The most compelling part is the ability to list your own bank of readymade black-box devices into the DSP browser - this is essentially allowing people to build their own effect units.

PS. Yeah that screenshot isn’t ridiculously uber-complex, but it illustrates about the level of complexity I reach when the DSP chain clutter starts to kick in.

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I think this is ultra-mega, alright. Stops send-channel hell where half your channels are just friggin send-channels. I’d be like Ctrl-click click click click Ctrl+G (stuff gets grouped into metadevice), rename the new metadevice, then dragdrop the new metadevice back into the effects list to add it as a new effect. If the sendtracks are not shared, they disappear into the metadevice. (If the sendtracks are shared, your choice of sendtracks becomes part of the ‘exposed interface’ of the metadevice.)
Bonus if we could attach/include the metadevice directly with an instrument and allow the effects to be applied per polyphony-channel instead of per track, giving you the sort of envelope control you really want.