Continued Conversation About 'freezing'

Ideas & suggestions
1

I read with interest a conversation in the help section about the possiblility of ‘Freezing’ tracks to an instrument to save CPU.

This is a great idea and would probably be quite easy to implement. After freezing a range to an instrument you could then choose to keep/mute/delete the pattern data or whatever. Very handy for those with slow CPUs or very heavy sequences.

I hope that Renoise gets a direct-from-disk feature at some point. Rendering large ranges to a disk-streamed file would be great.

I envisage a new screen within renoise much like the sample editor but instead multitrack… with basic editing tools etc.
When the user selects a range of pattern data to render to disk it appears in the multitrack view along a timeline that follows the pattern time.
The basic editing tools could be used to move that data around the timeline … cut/copy/paste sections and also to mix together (or bounce) sections down into a new track.

Looking a little deeper into this idea and some new thoughts :

A non-destructive approach would be cool. Where the original freeze/render becomes the parent file and all edits to this file are stored and undo-able.

Also the parent file could contain all the pattern data that was selected for the render. This would mean that the user could go into the multitrack view and actually edit the pattern data and re-render if he/she wanted to make some changes (but had long ago deleted the pattern data from the main view).
Of course if VSTi or samples had been moved/deleted since the render was done the pattern would not play back as before. This is a reasonable limitation I think … but :
To get around this the parent file could contain references to any samples or VSTi that had been used in it’s creation … it could get them into a temporary bank whos structure would be dictated by the state of the main instrument bank when the ‘freeze’ or ‘render’ was made.

2

Forgot to login again…

3

Would just like to cast my vote for the feature. Would be brilliant.

4

A definite thumbs up for this feature!

5

I actually spoke to phazze about this in the chatroom last week and although there was no official confirmation that this would happen, he did indicate that this will be a possibility when the disk streaming is implemented (this appears to be a definite development). So, here’s hoping :)

6

you talked to me, and yes. we have already discussed that issue internally.

the implementation wont be that easy and it doesnt fitt into our 1.3 release feature plan, but is already on our todo list, so we wont forget about this.

7

Oops! Old age seems to be catching up with me quickly…at least the first letter of the nick was correct :blink:

8

no idea how you planned the freeze, and maybe this is trivial, but anyway:

i would be great if the freezing would be done with a meta device. that way you could descide what gets static and what not.

so, for example, you could freeze the vsti and the 23 hungry FFT-pitchers you used in the channel, but the eq and compressor at the end of the chain still stay functional for mixing.

about the visualation:
i dont’t think it is needed to display the waveform image or whatever, just gray out the track, but in a way that the pattern data still can be seen, just not editable.

the location for the freeze-wavs could be set in the song properties, much in the same way as you show renoise the where the vst-directory is.