Hi! (please skip to the problem part if u don’t care to read the introduction part)
Since this is my first post on here, and i don’t see an introduction forum part or anything, ill introduce myself first: Im erwin from holland, 28 years old and new to renoise. Im not new to tracking, as a kid i was already making music with fast tracker 2, and later with skale tracker. But… i didn’t backup anything and my pc broke down, i lost everything, got kinda demotivated and stopped. Now, many years later, i discovered renoise, and it seems to be absolutely amazing, this got me motivated again, so im back in it. I also bought an akai mpk49 this time around, back in the days i just used a pc keyboard. Im using the free verstion right now, but im buying it soon. this is something that should be supported! Great piece of software, so much respect to the developers. (i think i only just learned about maybe half of the things u can do in renoise and already feel like i can make anything i would like to make)
Problem -
So i ran into my first problem, wich i don’t understand. I started making a song, and around the fifth pattern i used a change in BPM, i put the command in the sequencer, wich works perfectly fine. BUT… when i play the song from start, it automaticly sets the bmp to the value i put in that fifth pattern. So even if i change the song bpm, it just changes back to the set value when i press play.
I didnt understand it at all at first, but i found out, when i remove the bpm change in the fifth pattern, i can change the bpm for the whole song again, and it doesnt automaticly change it back when i press play. I hope someone can help me, i dont understand why renoise uses a command thats in the fifth pattern, in the first pattern!
(i would like to slow the song down (lower bpm) to accurately record live playing in my song, but that wont work because of this problem)
Thanks for the quick response. I didn’t know that.
So, that means i can not quickly slow the song down to record some live playing? I assigned the bpm to a knob on my midi controller to do that, so i could quickly lower the bpm for some acurate live recording.
But this would mean the only option to do this is to add a bpm command from where i want to start recording? It wouldnt be a huge problem, but it would slow down my workflow.
Also, i don’t really understand why renoise does what you just said… I mean, the automation is in the fifth pattern, isnt’t it odd that that value is used in the first? What’s the reason for this?
It simply scans the song for the first bpm/LPB/Ticksvalue value it can find and applies it, if it doesn’t, it will use the globally stored tempo and speedvalues. If there is a lead, it is being used, which has always worked like that. If you need dynamic BPM changes anywhere, then the current best thing is not to program any bpm value anywhere in the song but the global BPM value.
Yes you can, but every time it comes to a bpm command it switches back to that value if i’m not mistaking. You could skip the bpm commands all together and just use your knob.
When the track loops and goes back to the first pattern in the sequence, it keeps playing at the speed you set in pattern five anyway.
no, thats what i mean, if it would work the way you just explained, that would seem perfectly logical to me. But it picks up the bpm command from later in the song without reaching that position, without the song looping. It just ignores the global bmp setting when i press play because there is a bmp command halfway in the song! Isnt a tracker supposed to react to commands on the exact position you placed that command only? If not, that seems kinda confusing to me. Why does it pre-scan the song for commands?
it doesnt make sence to me, i mean a tracker is all about control right? I put the bpm command in a position in the fifth pattern, why does renoise use that command in every pattern, without having reached that command?
Dblue explained the way it works, but i still dont understand the logic behind it.
This was introduced when LongTrack1 was under way as problems were found without using this mode. If you put the start BPM in your first track (or even a single line, sub-first track) then you will be able to change BPM freely between that and the change in pattern 5. It is so bad to also put a value at the start of your song?
Sure there used to be a way to disable this lookahead mode in Preferences but the only thing I can see relating to automation is the “Update automation on song navigation” which I’m not sure is the same. You could try toggling it in the Plug/Misc section and see if it does help you at all though…
I will try putting a bpm command on the beginning of the song, but i actually believe it will reset to that bpm again when i for example, try to loop pattern 3 with a lower bpm (for easy live recording) I think it will reset the bpm every time the pattern loops, wich obviously is not what i want.
Of course i can always just remove all bpm commands in the song, this does “fix” my problem. Luckily there are more ways to get somethig you want in renoise
As kazakore says: you can disable the whole “parameter catch-up” system by going into Renoise preferences → Plugs/Misc → “Update automation on song position changes”
This will make sure that any parameter is only updated when it recieves an explicit value. But, use at your own risk
This won’t solve Edva’s problem, because this setting only affects DSP device parameter automation, not timing values such as BPM, LPB and TPL.
When you hit play, Renoise will look backwards from that point in time and try to find the most recent BPM command/automation to use as the starting value. If it cannot find anything, it will look forwards instead and use whatever it finds next, no matter where it is in the song. So if you only have a single BPM command in your entire song, then that’s the value Renoise will automatically use when you hit play.
You can freely change the BPM inbetween BPM commands, so the solution here really is to simply put a BPM command on the very first line of pattern 1. Then you can hit play, do whatever the heck you want inbetween pattern 1 and pattern 5, and then when pattern 5 comes along it will use the BPM you have set there.
when i press play from the beginning of the song, and let it play till the part i want to record live, yes it will work, but lets say i dont want/need to listen to the first 2 patterns, and manually want to choose lets say pattern 3 to do some live recording with a low bpm, when i press pla, it will revert back to the bpm setting at the beginning, right?
