you are with the renoise team… you are one the few who actually knows what’s being planned on? … right? 
Isn’t what you’re talking about there exactly a massive, messy look-up table I think most people who have even done one minute programming will tell you is best avoided. This is the point I’m trying to make to you. Unfortunately, with Scripting now being implemented, it seems less and less the time for the Devs to even consider changing Sony data structure to make things like this easier…
Which posts have you read? Go back to page 16. I clearly (and I mean CLEARLY) explain how Buzz’s Sequence Editor works, with screenshots, and why it is far superior to the old fashioned tracker method (i.e. the Renoise method).
Boo hoo.
Read page 16…
You obviously didn’t bother reading back far enough in the thread then. You obviously didn’t see whoever it was who was claiming that the Renoise way is perfectly good, but was unable to explain exactly WHY or HOW they used it as efficiently as the Buzz method.
Go back to page 16.
Boo hoo. Go back to page 16. I have already clearly described it, in huge detail, explicitly, with nothing more I could possibly add…
Replying to me twice? You realize you already replied to me on August 31 2010, quoting the exact same text, but this time with different words?
So basically, whenever a newsletter is sent, you login and post in this thread and just like to stir shit?
A lonely man…
I was only trying to explain what would be happening ‘behind the scenes’, what you see in the pattern editor would be what you expect to see.
No, it isn’t what the matrix would look like with numbers, unless I’m REALLY misunderstandin the matrix. From what you’ve just drawn, the matrix doesn’t actually exist or do anything! I thought you could clone tracks from a pattern and put it elsewhere, on another pattern, without having to manually copy and paste the entire pattern by hand?
As I’ve explained above, (and I don’t think anybody has understood it yet):
Renoise currently contains patterns. Each pattern consists of one or more tracks. You can mute individual tracks. You can copy and paste entire tracks to another pattern.
Right. Since you can do all of these things yourself, as the human operator of the program, the program itself can be made to do all of those things instantly, without you even knowing it’s doing them. i.e. instead of you highlighting an entire track manually, by positioning the cursor at the top and dragging down to the bottom (or however you do it in Renoise nowadays), and then using CTRL-C, and then moving to pattern 10, and using CTRL-V, the program itself could presumably do all of that with one keypress, right?
In the same way, if I can solo track 1 in pattern 1 and play it, and then solo track 2 in pattern 2 and play it, even using the current pattern system, it should be possible to play
Pattern 1 Track 1 Pattern 2 Track 2
simultaneously, right? All Renoise would have to do is look at the matrix, and the matrix would say "Copy Pattern 1 Track 1 into Track 1 of the ‘temp’ pattern, and copy Pattern 2 Track 2 into Track 2 of the ‘temp’ pattern, and then play the TEMP pattern, not the normal patterns.
So the matrix would look like
Drums1 Bass1
Drums2 Bass1
and it would copy and paste, in the background, invisibly, into the ‘temp’ pattern, the following:
Pattern 1 Track 1 Pattern 2 Track 2
Pattern 2 Track 1 Pattern 2 Track 2
etc.etc.
in other words, it should be possible to implement a Buzz like Sequence Editor (i.e. the best way of doing it) without changing anything much in the pattern editor. No need to implement anything new in the actual way the patterns are stored, you can just ‘hide’ what is actually happening in the patterns and show the user the ‘Buzz’ version of events.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if somebody far more intelligent than I came up with something like this using the new scripting function.
Just to reiterate, as so many people seem to be unable to read what I am saying properly - I WANT TO USE RENOISE, not Buzz. I only use Buzz because of its Sequence Editor, that is IT. Renoise is superior to Buzz in just about everything else it does, by orders of magnitude. But I can’t write using the Renoise pattern sequencer, nor the matrix (from the brief go I’ve had with it), because it’s not the way I, or most people, I think, write songs. (i.e. it’s far more difficult than it should be, and really ruins the flow of songwriting for me, and many others.)
Can you show me what it can do? Is there a video, or anything I can try using the demo version? It doesn’t do what I want it to do: let me represent patterns with numbers or names (my choice). Doesn’t let me have a pattern used eight times in a song, and allow me to edit it once, and all eight are edited at the same time. That’s it! That’s all I want to do with it. It’s so quick to edit songs in Buzz that any other tracker is like walking through molasses.
By the way, this is an example of exactly what I’m talking about, from 1:00 to 1:25…
I presume this guy doesn’t know about the Buzz Sequence Editor, because if he did, he would probably be asking for it to be implemented in Renoise too.
In other words, the user interface design part of the equation in Renoise has been missed out. The method shown on the video is painful and unnecessarily difficult, to say the least. In Buzz you would just move your cursor, press 1, right arrow, 1, right arrow, 1, or whatever number for the sequence you wanted, and that would be it. No combinations of Alt and Shift, no using the mouse, just cursor keys and numbers or letters, which represent the sequences.
And for those who haven’t used Buzz, you can rename the sequences to anything you like, but you still use numbers and letters to enter them, and they are permanently displayed on the right of the sequence editor, like:
- Intro
- Lick1
- Lick2
so pressing ‘0’ would change the Sequence to ‘Intro’. No need for different colours, that’s the most useless way of representing just about anything, unless there are only two states, and the colours never change and always mean the same thing.
In other words, in the Matrix we have useless colours and useless pattern icons (or representations, whatever you want to call them) which are of no value to the songwriter. If I make a drum pattern which I only use at the beginning of a chorus in Buzz, I just call it “DrumChorus” and I can SEE precisely where it is in the song, and I can change it to another drum sequence in one second by just pressing another key on the keyboard.
So I would say that the pattern matrix wasn’t designed properly in the first place, and the video I’ve linked to above shows how painful it is to do what should be incredibly easy.
For example, at 1:30 he changes the length of the pattern. This isn’t show in the pattern matrix! In Buzz the Sequence Editor represents sequence length correctly, and you can see if a sequence is 16 beats or 32 beats, etc. And you can mix 4 beat sequences in with 16 beat sequences. It’s just so obvious that the Buzz way is the easiest way, I can’t believe the Renoise team spent so much time on the matrix and yet didn’t really improve things. (As shown by my two previous points.)
Okay, it gets worse. 2:00 onwards. How to copy a pattern to the end of the sequence. In Buzz you would just move your cursor to the end of the sequence, and type
1 right 1 right 1 right 1
Finished. Now watch the contorted method you have to use in Renoise. It’s as if the developers have never seen the Buzz Sequence Editor and were stuck in the ‘old school’ way of doing things, and tried to improve on it, without fixing the fundamental problems.
I am holding out for the day somebody does it with LUA scripting. I imagine a load of Renoise users are going to be very happy when that happens.
XG2003 you know you can name your patterns already in renoise right??
XG2003: no offense, but we all got your point. Could you please start a new “Copy the Buzz Sequencer into Renoise” thread into Ideas & Suggestions and keep this one here a brainstorming thread?
I see that there are no responses after mine. So nobody has any other ideas to add?
Taktik, can you copy all my posts about the Buzz Sequence Editor to a new thread if I start one? Otherwise I’d have to either try to explain everything from the beginning (for people who haven’t read this thread), or continuously refer back to this one.
I thought this thread was for brainstorming the Arranger. Everything I’ve written is entirely relevant to that topic…
I’ve just watched that Youtube video again, that I put in my last post, and as a Buzz user it’s painful watching the convoluted methods that the guy has to use, just to do things that would take one second in Buzz, without needing to hold down the Shift and Alt keys and this and that…
How do I name the patterns in the Matrix? I thought the Matrix only had a graphical (i.e. pretty useless) representation for each track?
I kind of agree, I think the patternmatrix is a huge step forward in giving overview and love it.
But its still not as quick and powerful as a fullblown arranger or even like the solution I suggested years ago.
There is still need for a separate arranger in which you can combine tracks or clips from different patterns.
A simple but very easy to use tracker called miditracker has this, they call it orderview.
http://www.rf1.net/software/mt
Its a very quick way to compose.
You got the tracks like in the pattern matrix, but in the “arranger view” the number of the track decides from what pattern the track is.
Track 1 Track 2 Track 3 Track 4
00 01 00 18
01 01 00 18
02 04
03 06 00 01 01
04 01 00 01 01
Yeah, to me too… welcome back to the 80’s and 90’s
Track pointers: 
→ Track contents:
I’ve seen my share of this approach.
Looks great.
I can imagine a tracker with “standard” arrange window, but if you double click to the blocks, a pattern editor will open, instead of a piano roll…
ok i have to say i didn`t read the whole thread but some arranger features would be fine, maybe a timeline on the left side of the patern matrix where you can choose time or beats, very helpful it would be to take patterns in a group and give them a coulor or name so the whole overview should be much better especially when it is zoomable.
i think this can be easy to build in and would give a much better overview to the whole song
pattern matrix is sweet already. just needs ‘live’ mode. click on a block it starts playing, click on another. asynchronous playback of blocks .bleh
What I miss the most in the arranger department is the ability to
-
record something that spans across pattern boundaries, like a melodic phrase with a pickup.
-
have somethings repeat (like if you only have one pattern playing through the whole song) mixed with (so going on at the same time as) something that’s spaning upto the entire song, like an improvised melodic part throughout the whole song.
Right now, I eventually have to make all patterns unique for a from-start-to-finish part to be recorded.
I admit that I used Cubase years ago, then later Muse (linux) what have an entirely different, non-tracker layout. But the abillty to mix “patterns” of arbitrary length, potentially being “ghost copies” of each other (meaning editing one will affect all), is the thing I miss the most in renoise.
I havent read the whole thread so maybe this have been discussed before, but i think that for a starter it would be great if you could just play more than 1 pattern at the same time. For example you create pattern 1 with drums and patterns 2 with bass etc and then arrange the “sequence” so that:
[pattern1][pattern2]
[pattern1][pattern2]
[pattern1][pattern2]
[pattern1]
[pattern1][pattern2][pattern3]
I think it shouldnt be that difficult to implement (corrent me if im wrong of course, as i am not a programmer by any means)
combine that with the launchpad and bam purely awesomness will arise 
this is how I expected the matrix to work when I first saw it 
Oh dang, now I need this feature desperately.