It would be very great if I could have two installations of Renoise with different settings for output, since I have two soundcards connected to each other, so I could use two different ASIO drivers and have dual Renoise running! It would be great because I could then merge my songs and mix them together, most of my modules are short clips that just might have idea or two to be transferren directly to a song with more structure. But Renoise installations share settings, so when I fire up another instance I just might get audio lockup and that is no good.
So how do and can I come about it? If I could choose what ASIO channels to use in Renoise I could just use my one breakout box, but that does not work. Is this feature on the miles ling to-do list and if it is could it be expected to be in next release for example?
Its not in the TODOs vault yet, but this is something you could easily do with bash or windows scripts. Probably someone whos experienced with scripting could help us/you out here.
ScriptA:
copy ConfigA.xml to Config.xml
lauch Renoise
copy Config.xml to ConfigA.xml (to update changes)
ScriptB:
copy ConfigB.xml to Config.xml
lauch Renoise
copy Config.xml to ConfigB.xml (to update changes)
Clicking on ScriptA would launch and update Renoise with the A config set, ScriptB with the B set…
Thanks for the super fast reply! Yes that seems an obvious solution, some work tho… I guess this can be done with very simple batch scripts, so no huge thing. I’ll have to look what is it that those files contain tho, to know what I’ll be overwriting.
Ohh, wait. you want to run two Renoises at once, then this trick won’t work cause both Renoises will try to read/write from the same config file. Sorry, that was a bit too fast then
Selecting ASIO channels
Can’t you simply change the master tracks channel routing to do so?
No I can not because Renoise that last initializes drivers occupies all the channels so they cannot be used by another ptrograms or instances of Renoise. But I just found out that thanks to drivers, unlike my previous card, my current box does not lockup if multiple programs are trying to access same channels, so the audio thing is kinda solved for me.
I guess I was a bit too fast too. Still different configs could have some benefits, like midi ports, but that is minor.
For song-merging, we have an external tool that allow you to merge 2 songs into one. http://xrns-php.sourceforge.net/ (xrns-merge)
Renoise was not designed to be ran in multiple instances. There are not many DAWs that support this in general. One of the reasons why it is useless is because the MIDI device is not shareable. So there will always be one Renoise session where you will not have a MIDI-in device available, regardless what Audio driver you have picked. (Unless you have two physical soundcards)
The configuration files are being read from the generic configuration folder tied to the Renoise version. The only way to have two separate Renoise sessions running with each their dedicated sound-card configuration currently is running an older Renoise version and a newer one (e.g. running 2.0.0 and 2.1.0)
Or you have to use batch-scripts to rename the config file before Renoise is started.
My two renoise instances share virtual USB midi port with no problem at all. Tool you mentioned does just dumb merging and does not mix appropriate patterns and figures together in song, but I can give it a try, but it is much easier to copy-paste the partsI need. The point was to blend two compositions, not just join songs.
Other daws can often hold open multiple documents or “projects”, so there is no need for multiple instances really.
And may I add that I have tried only two pieces of software that correctly occupy and share ASIO channels, and those are Ableton Live and Sony Soundforge. I guess this feature is not that widely supported, and rewire is making it a bit of obsolete, since you can route the audio through the other software.
ASIO is a different piece of cake and very depending on the type of audio hardware that you use. so your Ableton Live and Sony Soundforge part is absolutely no global reference or guarantee that this works for anyone else. If you are lucky, the soundcard manufacturer supports an asio driver that allows to be shared, but this saying does not go for every ASIO supporting soundcard unfortunately.
I have a soundcard which cannot share its ASIO driver. Even stronger:I cannot even use DirectSound and ASIO together.
So whatever Ableton Live and Sony Soundforge offers you, these two DAWs will not be able to live up to this standard with my soundcard for sure.
Sorry,bad wording. Those two programs are only ones that allow using different channels for different programs when ASIO is running whatever the driver is. Of what I’ve tried that is.
Still different configs could have some benefits, like midi ports, but that is minor.