Apologies for replying to such an ancient post, but I’m really just surprised that something like this hasn’t been implemented yet, at least from what I can tell. It would work WONDERS for my personal workflow, even if it was something super basic, with no functionality outside of just “play this audio file to the patterns.”
I would love to volunteer myself to try to make this a reality with a Lua plugin, but from glancing over the docs a bit, it doesn’t seem like it would be possible? Or, at least in the way the mockup shows.
What’s NOT possible with Renoise tools:
Change Renoise’s existing behaviour. Like, you can’t make all C-4s in the pattern editor yellow instead of white. You can write your own pattern editor, but not change the existing one.
Realtime access. Except for OSC and MIDI IO, you can’t write scripts that run in the audio player. In other words, you can not script new realtime DSPs - yet.
I’ve seen many other posts about alternatives to this, like chopping up your audio file into blocks and playing it on every pattern with the offset command, but this solution is so much more elegant, not to mention FAST. Isn’t that what trackers are all about? Being able to make your music faster than using a piano roll and having to fiddle with hand-chopping all of your samples multiple times to work on a normal DAW grid?
Renoise is already more modern than most other trackers, it doesn’t seem to have THAT many reservations to be hyper-traditional. I don’t see why a feature like this would be any different than any other modern nicety Renoise adds.