I have an asus N55SF laptop running windows 7 home premium. The issue I have is if I press one of the ‘custom’ keyboard buttons - volume up/down, mute, play, stop and then enter edit mode in renoise G# is repeatedly entered into the pattern editor until I either turn off edit more or quit renoise. On going back in after closing renoise it is fine again until one of the offending buttons is pressed.
Any idea why this is happening? Renoise is the only piece of software where I have encountered issues of this nature.
Not that i know of, you are the first one to report this problem unfortunately.
Keyboard drivers that allow special keys to be used, usually send impossible key-scan combinations to distinguish the keypresses (keycombinations no human would or could ever make), these can differ for each manufacturer.
But that it repeats seems like a bug to me. In Windows you can change the way how keyboard repeat is applied, this might resolve the keyrepeat option but also disables it for everything else in Windows.
Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Ease of Access Center\Set up Repeat and Slow Keys
Does renoise look at the bios or windows codes? It seems odd that in no other software is ‘H’ triggered, yet in renoise it is. Obviously once it is triggered, with no key up event it acts as a very long keypress and the issues that I see.
I wouldn’t mind so much but I use those buttons a lot, particularly so when using renoise!
Renoise uses Directinput which allows a very low level access to keyboard control (and quick responses which is quite necessary if you need tight timings).
These keys could very well cause problems in any other program using DirectX (like games). Renoise is not average Windows software.
We are using both, but in this case it indeed uses the bios code (the raw scancode) which maps to the letter “H”. Kinda strange that the keyboard sends those, and unfortunately I don’t think we can do anything here, sorry. This looks like a quirk in the drivers to me.
Yeah it is pretty odd that the keyboard is sending the bios code for H. I will raise a ticket with ASUS and see what they say. Clearly a problem with the asus implementation and not renoise!
I have an Asus G74S laptop running Windows 7 Ultimate and I too have the same symptom you describe.
I appreciate your diagnosis, I had not linked the use of the special function buttons for volume etc as being the trigger for what I had considered to be a random act which would repeat G# into my pattern overwriting my work.
The work around I am using is to keep the windows taskbar visible and clicking on the taskbar before activating the special key, this stops the repeat from happening for me. And if I do forget to do this and start a repeat, whilst the repeat is in effect, clicking the windows taskbar seems to send the repeat stop signal.
Please do post here if you find a “proper” solution or if Asus came back to you with advice, I will do the same.
Knowledge is power, so whilst it is a pain - I at least know understand what is happening and how to avoid it or halt it.
Thanks J-Hob, Appreciate your sharing the experiance.
Cheers for the workaround tip, will remember that one. I have no ‘proper’ fix for it. I did report to asus technical support but they weren’t an awful lot of help.