Compact View For Effect Slots

Ideas & suggestions
1

When using more than a couple of effects in a track, I find myself scrolling left and right a lot (luckily, mouse wheel works nicely here).

I think it will be very nice if there was another standard button on the top left corner of each inserted effect, that will collapse the effect slot to the minimal width possible.

It will be even nicer, if the right click menu of each effect will have functionality similar to the one in the mixer tab, where you can choose which sliders you want to view.

This way, you will be able to have tracks with many effects in the chain, where most of them are collapsed, and only the ones you are still working on, are expanded.

In addition, this will provide another nice functionality:
In VST effects where there are many many sliders, the obvious way to edit them, is to open their external editor. Since they have many controls, expending their sliders inside Renoise is impractical.

With this “View” right click functionality, you will be able to select only the sliders you are interested in - and never have to open the external editor again.

Easier to control, easier to automate and less cluttered on the eyes.

Any voters?

2

count me in. ++

3

im also for this idea

4

+1 For the collapsable effects!

…Since horizontal sliders are having quite a witdth already, -1 for the selectable slider (vertical sliders are quite a different UI-experience and changing horizontal to vertical sliders can be confusing).
The collapsed effect slot should contain an expand (de-collapse) button, the effect enable/disable button could be showed above it…when you want to edit the effect, you can simply expand the single box by clicking this expand button (other collapsed effects remain state).
For convenience, a “collapse all” and “expand all” action should be added in the right-mouseclick-menu of the DSP-chain.

5

+1

Very useful.

6

Isn’t the mixer more suitable for this purpose?

7

The mixer is definitely nice, but I guess it all depends on your music making style, and the stage you are at, when making the changes.

Personally, I am constantly changing the location of effect slots during the making of the track. Note, I am not doing it at the end, when the track is ready and I just need to mix it, but I do it during the creation.

So, moving to the mixer tab just to do this, is to me more labor intensive than using the mouse wheel to scroll.

I am guessing you are using a resolution higher than 1024x768 (or a widescreen), so you do not see it as a problem - but to me, lack of width is truly an issue in Renoise - both in terms of space for effect slots, and also when scrolling left and right on a song with more than 12 channels.

I find myself hiding whatever I can - volume column, effects column etc - which eventually, compromises my music making techniques. For instance, I would use automation instead of the effects column, just so that I will not have to see that effects column in front of me, having it take up width space.

Another argument is this: Consider a situation where you are totally happy with the settings of your delay and reverb - wouldnt you want to hide them from view? Sort of a way of saying: This is good, no need to mess with it? I know I would.

Same for tracks - My kick-kick-kick track is not going to change. I would love the option to compact its view so that it is just a few pixels wide, to say “there is a track here”.
This way, it is also sort of “locked” - I cannot accidentally put notes there, as sometimes happens to me (for instance, when a VST window is up, but Renoise is in Editing mode and I press a key on the keyboard to see how the patch of the VST sounds).

I know I repeat things here, but I feel strongly about it. :)

8

I’m with you… to be honest, I’ve never used the mixer view. I have a widescreen but still lots of effects are falling off the screen, collapsing them would be neat!

9

I did not used the mixer view too much at the beginning either.
Once i went down to seriously performing some mixing, i really had to use it, to fine-tune all the things, this included the effects.
Yes the effect slider view is not very handy, but usually, i put up the minisliders that i need to tweak and then just click the effect in the mixer to see the full blown effect in the DSP frame. This is only in case i need precise values, if the value doesn’t really matter too much, i do it in the mixer view.

I don’t get disturbed by the pattern editor scrolling up, i can focus myself on the VU meters and on the sound and meanwhile tweak effects here and there when necessary.

10

Well yea, if you have a vst with like 50 parameters its very handy to be able to collapse that. If the mixer view is for tweaking effects, why is there view of effects in first place at bottom portion of screen?

Auto-expand and collapse all would be nice, so when you click on effect so that it gets focus it automatically expands to preconfigured slider view. Essential would be also view presets for effects that could be auto-loaded when loading an effect. Like default view per DSP (for mixer screen too). Also must be saved with song.

11

this is off topic.
could this be reworked another way. to also allow effects on the instruments themselves.

by freeing the effects from tracks, to make the effects standalone from the tracks.
then you don’t have to have multiple instances of the exact same effect, and then need to update the multiple cloned effects parameters on the other tracks. unless of course you do need a cloned effect with different params. then the effect could have tabs.

maybe an effects page all together* and standalone* at the same time.
might take a lot of un-needed complication out of the picture for when the scripting is available.

12

Send channels?
Not really following you. Completely new effects view? Modular routing? Or what?

e: Yea offtopic. Solution by changing the whole concept. Why not to make completely new well argumented thread about it?

13

i tangeiated (if that is a word) & even went Off Topic, in the completely wrong thread…
win win win i say! :D

in fact i agree with Icarus.
i find myself scrolling from side to side quite a lot.

but, i don’t like using the mouse as stated, it makes me feel like i’m cheating! or at least wish i had a third hand.

is it possible the scrolling from side to side is contrary to the loved aesthetics?

i believe the problem could be that it is, horizontal.
the effects pane and the automation pane in totality are the only real horizontal aspects of renoise. besides of course the time tested wave editor and the levels at the top.
these two panes i believe may be coin in the dryer. :)