I may have missed a clear explanation of this on the Renoise Wiki, but I did look for a bit. Many threads discuss issues surrounding the tick based audio engine, but I just wanted to clarify it and perhaps clear up how notedelay/cut work in relation to that.
F106 = 6 ticks per line
F104 = 4 ticks per line
F102 = 2 ticks per line etc…
Is this correct? If so, then changing speed mid-pattern directly affects all tick based commands, no? Though I’ve used them extensively, it is has been primarily by ear (i.e. what sounds good) and I haven’t fully internalized the logical relationship between retrig/notecut/notedelay and pattern lines.
Example:
C-3 00 F2 F106
My understanding is that this note has 6 available ticks per line to work with. The F2 cuts the note after 2 of those ticks, meaning 1/3 of that line. When does it actually start calculating the cut? Is there a tick that occurs before it? The reason I ask is that it doesn’t always seem to behave exactly as I would expect, so I’m unsure sometimes.
I have spent a lot of time in F106 out of sheer habit from the past, but will probably start working in F103 more regularly with 128 lines per pattern, which should be fully compatible with F106 and tempo/pattern based VST effects and instruments. How will this affect the tick based effects? I think my math-fu is weak, because for some reason it seems like notecut-F2 at F106 is an unattainable position at F103 due to the weird 1/3 line fractions. Am I just completely dense?
------------------EDIT---------------------
Ok, I think I missed something when thinking that through. Since the BPM hasn’t changed and you’re simply eating through twice as many lines at F103 as F106, the number of ticks per beat is actually… exactly the same? So, now I’m thinking that
C-3 00 F2 F106
and
C-3 00 F2 F103
…will sound identical because 1/3 of 6 ticks is 2 ticks and F2 of F103 is… 2 ticks?
I hope I’m getting this right. It seems to not makes sense to me, but still does somehow.
VST’s usually are BPM related, if you use any of the following speeds then the bpm given will match an exact bpm rate for VST plugins and possibly MIDI hosts that are controlled by Renoise or vice versa:
1,2,3,6,12
The tick amount is just the subdevision of each row. So if you set speed to 3, each line will contain 3 ticks and if you set it to 6, you will have a finer resolution of 6 ticks per line which gives you more points of sound alteration through effects or automation (transitions are smoother in automation if you use a higher tick rate).
F103 will sound identical to F106 if you shrink your patterns twice in size. Tickrate is lowered twice as much (6 ticks became 3) so your pattern play will speed up twice as much.
So, are you saying that automation would actually be smoother at F106 than at F103 at 128 lines per pattern? That doesn’t make sense. I would think they would be identical, since the number of pattern lines/ticks ratio would be the same.
Wouldn’t F102 be a strange fraction of F103/F106 making it incompatible with BPM related VSTs? I always thought F102 was twice the pattern speed of F104.
Taktik did something with the way error-quantization is done in the program to make it bpm-tight on several speed-levels.
Renoise 1.5 behaved different in this speed/bpm combination that caused most supplied bpm rates not being exact matching with the true bpm values.
I think that for Speed 2 some different routine is applied to make the set bpm rate matching exact.
The smoothing part in automation wasn’t really well explained in my previous post, in 1.5 automation was interpolated between lines but not between ticks. Since 1.8 also values are being interpolated on tick level.
A confusing matter may be that you can’t control automation on tick level by setting specific values on each ticks.
