Brainstorming: Piano Roll

Ideas & suggestions
161

This “pure” tracker argument(s) reminds me of a friend who, back in the dos days would not run a program that wherent’ coded in assembler.
I hope I wont have to argue how silly thas really was, even back then. The same argument for only using asm. coded software is just as silly imo regarding the “pure tracker” nonsence.
Now, just because some of you can do the kind of music you do in a traditional tracker interface doesn’t rule out that different kind of music could benefit from some other means of inputting/modifying the note data. Now you might say something about sonar/cubase/reason. Fact is for myself, that i would prefer to have it both ways. some parts of the music i do the tracker way is way better than any piano roll type of view, but then ther are other stuff that don’t really play nice with tracker view type of input, sure it can be done but it’s not quick or easy in any way.

just my 0.02€

162

I’m all for adding new stuff to the tracker. Different minds different approach. But before this is done i think it’s important
that devs use their time on perfecting everything that is
allready in the tracker. When all that stuff is perfect more stuff
can be added. But adding new stuff all the time and dont use time
to test it is the certain death of renoise.

Also if many new things are added i would like that the “original tracker” interface stays default. And users who wont a pianoroll kinda view selects this from a kind off preferences.

my 2 cents ;)

163

I updated my last picture with The Piano Roll column showing the original Tracking note column on the side as well. This should be able to be hidden of course but kinda neat to see notes appearing in that track after drawing you note by hand in the piano roll for instance =)

I also added Track groups, Could be quite useful and i think it should be implemented ASAP. It’s just a graphical improvement of send tracks. It would work exactly the same, although you would get more structure this way. And minimizing tracks would be lovely to save some space. and get a clearer overview. No need to see all the stuff you’re not working on at the moment.


FULL SIZE PICTURE

Any suggestions or ideas?

164

One advantage i see with pianoroll that might not be that clear in a trackerview is the note length, and that is ofc there in your picture. But also, since the screen is wider than it’s high (unless you have some really old mac…) a piano roll running sideways is better for getting a better overview if whats playing and whats to come.
And as i said in an earlier post, piano rolls are good for some stuff where a tracker view might not be that good, but it goes the other way around aswell… a tracker view can be pretty awesome compared to pianoroll. So what i’m trying to say, from the poing of composing i dont see the real benefit from running the tracker-patterndata alongside the pianoroll, except perhaps visualizing notelength.

165

I like the minimize and group ideas alot. :yeah:

(I will surely always become sick if i see notes of bars n’pipes in the pattern though.)

166

I disagree strongly about the sideways view. When i create, why would i want to see whats far away from the timestamp im editing at? It’s a creation tool, not an image viewer. It’s more useful to see more tracks (not lenght of track) and whats happening at the same timestamp.

Regarding visual view of the note lenght, how about just putting some instrument selected colored background behind the instruments start and stop in the pattern?

167

well as i said earler, we probably not create music in the same way. (sideways pianoroll would ofc not mix very will with a tracker-view visualized at the same time)

Perhaps someone could give me an example when a downward pianoroll + tracker-view would actually be useful… i can’t think of any situation.

168

I agree, piano rolls are not useful in a Tracker. It’s a fact. We compile and track tracks with trackers. The more tracks you get room for on the screen, the better. Hence vertical scrolling, since monitors are wider than tall.

Pipe sequencing was based on the note system, better for editing single instrument tracks.

However, all that being said. Apart from thinking stoneage notes, i think the second big thing that makes people push for horizontal view is the current limitations to the pattern system. Like when you deal with long samples, vocals, envelope editing etc… But im sure it’s only a matter of time until Renoise will enable us to do envelope editing seamlessly across patterns. And hopefully see visual graphs along the vertical tracks (goodbye horizontal envelope graph). Calculated triggers for samples to continue play at the same spot you start playback is likely easy to implement. Little things like that.

Anyway, i’ll stop commenting horizontal stuff now :) I promise…

169

I think piano roll used for editing note positions and note offs is VERY useful. I’m getting frustrated editing notes with Insert, Backspace, Ctrl+C Ctrl+V. at times. Nudging a note and everthing else after that note moves then you have to nudge it all after that note back to position again and it is getting quite tideous at times. Not to mention if you’re having delay effects and inte Pan or Volume column, and you have to nudge and rewrite the delay and stuff.

I would benefit greatly from having a Piano Roll in my Renose, I wouldnt compose songs using it, but for editing notes that I already “tracked”, that i wanted to change.
I think a Piano roll could be implemented safely without you ever having to rely or even using one. It could just be there in case there are some more poor people like me that thinks it’s really annoying nudging notes with keystrokes.

I’ve been tracking since childhood on my Amiga, and i would call myself a “tracker” at heart. If the renoise team would make a simple version of a Piano roll, JUST for editing notes, it could be included in the a beta for tryout. If people don’t want it there and don’t like the funktionality, toss it out, and focus on something else. If they like it … well … then it’s great.

170

I’ll tell you one thing that would be even cooler: a clipboard xml2midi & midi2xml converter. A bridge between apps. (Or, if that’s technically difficult, a simple .mid export of selected data.)

“JUST for editing notes” is exactly what Sonar, Cubase and such pro software does exceptionally well already. Given a proper means of communicating with these softwares (i.e. MIDI), advanced piano-roll editing, quantizing, note-length modifying etc will suddenly become available.

(It’s not like the piano-roll idea is bad per se, but it’s a peculiar development priority in my perspective. If midi export already was implemented then, sure, I’d also suggest that stuff like a piano roll could have some merits to include in a tracker “just for editing notes”. But not at this stage.)

171

Well that’s an option too, but since renoise introduced Recording in the Sample editor i hardly even use Sound Forge anymore.

It would be cool if that worked too, but speaking of island and continents. Would your country import oil if you already had it?

I personally dislike swithing between programs or connecting them, but that’s my way of working. I tryed using rewire between Cubase and Reason but I didn’t like it at all. Too messy and complicated. And Switching programs… painful… Having many programs running at the same time has an impact performance wise also.

If I could like you describe use another software to edit notes i wouldn’t do it anyway cuz it’s too messy and annoying. Maybe if that program was directly linked to renoise so if you opened a song you would see the same data on both programs, and editing the notes in a pianoroll in that program would instantaneously update in renoise as well, but i doubt that’s even doable.

I think would stick to nudging with insert button even if this was possible, It just makes no sense.

It’s like Maya’s ability to handle Illustrator files. You have to resave them in the other program and refresing in the other to see the update. Totally useless and very annoying.

“Ctrl + P” to view the piano roll in renoise. Edit edit. tweak, tweak. Ctrl + P again back to Original track view. and you listen again and moan -“Ahhhh just like you wanted it…” wouldn’t that be something?

172

i ll not use it but lot of people are waiting that to leave fruity loops to renoise (with graphic pattern arranger of course like fruity tracks)

173

-1 for Arranger. That would ruin the whole concept of tracking. Maybe pianoroll isn’t the way to go but I would cetanly want to try it out and see if improves my workflow. Or maybe someone else could invent another Genious way of editing notes with the Mouse instead of with keys.

174

Sure, it would be something. Quickly moving around notes, cutting them in length, etc – this is really time-saving and useful. I agree with all this.

But my point is that introducing a piano-roll at this stage will most likely open up a can of worms.

Why? For argument’s sake, let’s suppose taktik announced that he has a basic pianoroll ready for the next upgrade. And that would draw some attention from around the world (Fruity Loops users, etc). It wouldn’t take long before a lot of guys who converted to Renoise would pop up here and demand that the piano-roll had more and more advanced editing tools implemented (and whatnot else they are used to).

175

Hmmmmm I don’t see why that would be a bad thing? If a piano roll should be intruduced it should be to benefit the tracking part of using a tracker. That’s why it should be used as a tool, and nothing else. I really doubt people used to other programs will start to demand things that this doesnt have since it’s way too differnet from other music software. When i bought propellerheads I din’t enter their forums demanding this and that becouse I couldnt run FT2 on my computer anymore cuz lack of DOS.

Horizontal fullscreen piano roll like other programs in renoise. HELL NO!, but a handy tool for editing. Hmmmm. maybe. I think the pattern view iitself is the spine and backbone of tracking and shouldn’t be messed with. Although i can think of many ways to improve the pattern view, and my scetch in this thread was one of them.

Anyways. I don’t think more registering users would be the downfall of the dev team. Maybe they can earn a lil more money on this, Maybe quit their daytime job, or start working 50%, and spend more time on improving renoise. A rich dev is a happy dev, and happy devs make nice new features and improvents.

176

In light of Lareux’s recent concept images, I’d like to bring to your attention to these 9 month old images:


Full Size


Full Size (with annotations)

There’s track grouping, maximise (not minimise, though that would be good too), labelled notes, volume and pitch-bend visualisation, interactive pitchbend, volume “airbrush”, vertical zoom for finetuning timing…

Transcender, implementing this piano roll will have Cubase/Sonar/Logic devs rolling over in their newly established (by us) graves.

Piano Roll has always been about what note, what time. The next generalisation of this is what is approached by these images. What we should be moving toward is a rich, detailed, interactive graph of musical activity over time.

Here we just see instrument (colour), volume (opacity) and pitch (with bending) on the graph… you can imagine how many layers of musical information you can map onto this thing. Like fill with waveform, 0xx arpeggio visualisation, colour by pan (or two views of the same track with one set to Opacity by Left Pan, the other set to Opacity by Right Pan, and the whole 3D soundscape is actually visible right there on the screen…)

The important thing here is why a piano roll is proposed in the first place: more direct visual feedback, more direct control over the sound, and the most important result: a more direct route from your brain to the final product.

Pattern data is currently considered the “spine” of the program.
It is important to know that pattern data is first and foremost musical data.
It’s pretty damn clear from the size and longevity of this thread that there is a need for more directly controllable musical data.

Piano Roll will not take over Pattern View. Pattern View will not be the only source of data for Piano Roll. Instead both views should be based on an underlying set of musical data with high precision timing and other parameters. It could be a 2D array like it is now, it could be an N-tree sorted by event time. Whatever. We already set upon this path with the introduction of Automation curves. They are not part of the pattern data but they are part of the musical data. It’s time to get all the musical data in one central location and to recognise Automation and Pattern View as two different angles on the same theoretical data structure.

“Compose without Wires burns Directly from Brain to DVD that is already in Store”

That’s the end-state we’re all aiming for isn’t it :)

177

The above implimentation sounds and looks pretty perfect to me.

I like the renoise interface and dont exactly “need” piano roll but id certainly use it for more complicated melody parts alongside the tracker view (or whatever we ll call it) I would honestly prefer changes to the speed/resolution as discussed in that thread before this though.

178

any idea when this is going to be implemented?

though I love tracking i still use reason and cubase for complex melodies , think if renoise had one I’d never need use another program ever :P

179

I’m pretty sure a piano roll is dead last on the priority list… as you can tell by the age of this thread

180

… then again this thread is pinned… never noticed that :P