I want to write some sort of crazy song mangling tools for renoise, and I figured I’d ask for some ideas of what you guys would like to see in a free .xrns smashing tool… if I like your idea, I might just rip it off and not give you credit! 
… seriously though, I will give credit for the ideas 
not really crazy mangling, but could be usefull.
I don’t know if this is possible, but some kind of ‘linking’ tool. Lets say you’ve used a kickdrum sample in your song, namely C-400, now you want to link this particular note/sample nr. to another sample or vst instrument which you could specify in the tool, so that everytime the C-400 is present and read in a certain pattern, the ‘linked’ sample/instr will be automatically programmed on a new track.
This could be helpful when you’ve programmed a very dense beat on 1 track, and want to ‘shadow’ parts of that beat on another track…sure you can press enter to audition samples in a pattern, and manually program in the other beat…but if this could somehow be automated that’d save me time and leave room open for experiment.
Offcourse the linked samples could be anything, doesn’t have to be beats. Maybe some kind of random choice could be implemented when a linked sample would be programmed in or not? (creating shifting delays) Or randomisation in the pitch of the linked sample from light humanisation in tuning to transpositions over time.
In addition to the simple linking / find & add -> for melodies it would be cool if some kind of chord generation could be produced.
so a simple monophonic melody on 1 channel could be made polyphonic according to a selected modus / scale or microtuning (I’ve uploaded a bunch of .tun files here, if you don’t have them already: http://sisforawesome.com/upload/files/25/tun.rar )
I think a cool idea would be an ‘auto-finisher’…basically, you feed in a single pattern with a lot of tracks and when you feed it in, it auto turns it into a 5 minute long dance track…all you’d have to do is have it ask you questions about the song and tracks…for instance:
Question 1: Please select type of instrument for each track:
Track1 -
[] Percussion
[] Pad
[] SFX
[] Vocal
[] Lead
[] Arpaggio
[] Other
(repeat for rest of tracks)
Question 2: What style of music to model song after?
[] Classic House (straight forward, small changes)
[] Generic Techno (straight forward, building)
[] Trance (rhythmic, drums fallout, build up, big finish)
[] Trip Hop (freeflowing)
[] Ambient (your percussion tracks will be deleted!)
[] Pop (short and sweet)
[] Drum and Bass (intro, normal, middletro, bigger, outro)
[] etc. (other styles)
[] etc. (other styles)
Question 3: Please select transitions and changeups for your song (select all that apply):
[] Tape stop
[] Percussion Rearrangement
[] Melody rearrangement
[] Arpaggio randomizing
[] Transpose
[] Reverse
[] Unexpected percussion stops
[] Strobe Mutes
[] Snare Rolls
[] Kick Rolls
[] Slowly increase Tempo after a slowdown
[] HighPass filter entire output
[] LowPass filter entire output
[] Bandpass filter entire output
[] etc. etc. etc.
Question 4: Can I play with track effects?
-Track1
[] Yes
[] No
-Track2
[] Yes
[] No
-Track3
[]Yes
[]No
etc. etc.
…and so forth and so on…
I think this would be a fun way to quickly see how a quick idea would sound as a song…and if it sounds okay, then you could go back and fix up places and add new details and such. You could also make several patterns and mark them as different ‘sections’ of the song and have each ‘section’ (i.e. verse, chorus) have separate questions about what can be done with it, maybe even randomize when each ‘section’ comes in by asking the percent chance to change to another section after each pattern.
There was a ‘techno-generator’ created, but it didn’t involve the user at all…it had a bunch of algorhythms and simple beats premade. This is kind of the same thing, but you have more control of the song because you write the main piece of music and have the song generated based on your initial input of both notes AND algorhythms to use…
What do you think?
Eeeeevil tool.
Actually… the xml song format could be very tempting for algorithmical composition! And no, not to destroy “real music”, but for fun/insight (and good sound quality at the same time!). Besides… if you tweak your code so much that it actually produces something that sounds like music, one could argue you’re composing at a even higher level? I’ve yet to hear anything algorithmically composed that didn’t sound horrible though… I’d prefer a dance music bot for sure. That might at least be fun, even if just for a few minutes.
Well, I actually had an idea, which I posted in the ideas thread, for algorithmic music composition based on the idea of placing a probability value (0-100) on each note… then Renoise would decide what notes would be played based on a simple random seed. The result would be that you could create intricate evolving melodies and percussive patterns that would never play 100% the same twice, but would have similar accents no matter how many times they played…
… Noone liked my idea 
… I had a few people comment that this would be better accomplished with a VSTi, but I argued that I’d essentially have to reprogram Renoise to do so. So, I figure, I might try out writing an external tool to do so. shrug Load a pattern in, then assign probabilities to each note, and have my app pop out a certain number of variations? … who knows. anyway. keep the ideas coming! 
Actually, all these ideas are great. I just think everyone should steer clear of this:
We ARE trying to break the mould here 
I suggested that because you could have a 187 bpm drum and bass pattern, feed it in and tell the program to make it progress like a pop tune and get unexpected results.
Here’s another idea…
Create a pattern or two then run it through this mangling process (i really wish I was a coder so I could try this stuff!)
Mangler will render each track or randomly select tracks to render together…then, it will chop and basically ‘glitch’ them up via their rendered sample outputs. Obviously, it would require full version. It also might be required to render the loops yourself THEN feed it to the mangler.
It would be interesting. Render the tracks as samples then have the mangler rhythmically, albeit randomly chop/reverse/slowdown/rewind/retrigger/etc./etc. the rendered patterns into a weird idm headscrew.
Yes? No? Lame?
Unfortunately, Renoise can’t be automated… I can change pattern data and raw sample data… that’s it. There’s no way to program metadevices or anything
That would be just pattern data, you’d just have to require the user render the patterns by hand then run the mangler…
ideally it would be able to change every pattern and not just run the same glitch effect through the whole song, something you cant really do with those mangling vsts as it would take hours to AUTOMATE THEM
I LOVE this idea, I’m willing to cough-up a bit of cash if this tool becomes real 
How about a pattern shifter, so you can shift notes up or down and have the data that normally would “fall off” appear on the other side. Could be pretty fun, especially if it’s not just linked to an entire pattern but on columns.
Groove tool that could be used on quadruple tempo projects…
It would change every fourth notes placement, and add a D value to each on. These would be specified using a slider.
like this -> 
-D-402 D5 0000
-D-402 D5 0000
-D-402 D5 0000
-D-402 D5 0000
-D-402 D5 0000
or… for the “really grooving” grooves…
-D-402 D5 0000
-------------------
D-402 D5 0000
-D-402 D5 0000
-------------------
D-402 D5 0000
-D-402 D5 0000
Here’s an idea, not very crazy though and probably only good for piano like sounds:
for instrument X on track Y
- check all notes, remember the lowest and the highest note
- set the panning so that the lowest note gets panned to the left, the highest note to the right, and all other notes in between where they would be on a keyboard
For ideas/inspiration on creating bizarr and catchy music, check out shpongle and younger brother.
Sickest and most creative music you will ever hear.
I kid you not.
I personally don’t see what all the hype about shpongle is… If I want to listen to “trippy” music, I think artists like Mike Patton(Mr Bungle, Fantamos, Tamohawk), Mars Volta, etc are much more creative, entertaining, and mind opening than shpongle is. In fact, I’d dare say shpongle is kinda boring.
… besides, what’s with offrailing this thread, hmmm?