Clipboard / Arranger - A Simple Solution

Ideas & suggestions
1

There have been some suggestions lately about an arranger/clipboard based approach to organizing pattern data. I would like to contribute to that discussion, by sketching out MY preferred implementation of it. Observe that this is NOT exactly the same idea as suggested before (most recently in the “Snippets” thread), although it may echo some of them to a large extent.

I’ve made a quick sketch in Photoshop:

How it would work:

  1. You select something in the pattern; be it a couple of notes, an entire track or several tracks with data.
  2. Next you open the Clips-panel and choose one of the (empty) slots by clicking on it.
  3. Next you click on the Store-clip-to-slot button (in the picture above that is the Left-arrow button)
  4. The selection is now stored and can be pasted into the pattern, at the cursor location
  5. To paste data, just place the pattern cursor somewhere, mark the clip you want from the slots, and then press the Paste-clip-to-pattern button (in the picture above that is the Right-arrow).

Some other comments:

A ‘clipset’ contains 256 slots, each holding one clip of data. The clipset itself isn’t saved with the song, it has to be loaded, saved and configured manually. (But this is actually a good thing, because it opens up potential applications.)

My approach to the subject of arranging is to keep the vertical “tracker perspective” intact. This clipset-based structure would be possible to implement without touching the .xrns format itself (why mess with it?). In fact, this particular arranger/clipboard is quite “stand-alone” – merely involving the common CTRL+C and CTRL+P procedures (but much faster).

(Yes, one can place clipboard content in e.g. external text-files or databases. However, that’s not very fast or intuitive. So why not integrate such a clipboard arranger into Renoise itself, with preview/playback of the clip’s content and ultrafast pasting into the pattern. That’s how a proper tracker arranger should work, IMHO.)

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2

So, once you copy the clips to the pattern editor they become the same as other pattern data?

For me, the main benefit of an arranger would be having clips ‘synced’ with pattern data. For example, if ‘clip 1’ is a drum beat and ‘clip 2’ is a variation on the same beat, it would be great if changing something about clip 1 updated all instances of it in the pattern editor. This is what I find most difficult about arranging in Renoise: having to memorise what edits are where. Perhaps a ‘sync’ option could be added to some copied clips?

I think your clip pool (can I call it that?) is a good way to go about things though :)

3

in my mind:
the patterns would arrange theirself chronological (like clone/make new pattern nowadays).
you dont have to switch to the arranger page.
(->arranger: just to arrange patterns/blocks seperate)

true or what?!