Dedicated renoise controller

Renoise Tool Development
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Hey people,
A few months ago I bought a hardware sequencer/ sampler (mpc live) and I started making music with it. A few days after having bought that, I saw a teaser of polyend tracker and I thought that it would be something that I could work with.

Today, after some time, I booted renoise and although It is the environment I adore making music on, I felt it has lacking the tacktile, hands on approach the dedicated boxes have.

I am sure that the qwerty keyboard is one of the fastest input methods, and If somebody knows the key shortcuts very well, the whole process can be very fast. Still you still need to grab the mouse say for adding or tweaking effects, which it felt like a drag, unintuitive and uninspiring.

Now, I am a programmer and I have some basic knowledge of electronics and I though that maybe it could be possible to create a dedicated controller for renoise.
For that I wanted to ask if somebody knows, what are the methods, apart from keyboard, midi and osc you can communicate with renoise, is there an api for that or something or you’ll just have to simulate keystrokes with your controller? Do you know how the “dedicated” controllers work? Do they send midi messages to the daw they work with, or does anything else happen?

Cheers!

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Great idea, I’d love to see something like this

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i agree with you for everything. And yet i’ve dumped mpc for renoise… because nowadays i cannot spend 3 hours fiddling with drums and layering, nudging notes on the mpc lcd, yet i still miss the fluid workflow… both have pros and cons…

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It’d be cool to have both at the same time though

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There is a Lua API and a built-in script editor that is hidden by default. Search the docs about how to activate it. It includes the documentation and examples.

The most common way that you would integrate new controllers is adding them into the Duplex tool which is a common code-base for communicating with midi-controllers.

I made a sketchy “dedicated” renoise controller out of a Korg padKONTROL. It has a special “sysex-only” mode where it transmits and receives commands to control the lights, the 7-digit text display and it transmits all buttons, the rotary encoder and X/Y pad etc.
It can select tracks, do transport control, play notes, control voume/pan, schedule a pattern etc.

I also bought a Novation SL Zero MK2 recently which has similar capabilities, there is a sysex manual which describes how to control the display (can send text or pixels). I was thinking of tinkering with that. It could show you the parameters of the selected plugin-devices for example. Or it could be turned into a step sequencer.

I assume it is probably common for Maschine/Push etc. to also send CCs, NRPNs or sysex on a separate or hidden virtual midi device. But maybe they use some other protocol over usb, who knows.

The most important thing I am missing is to control the disk browser via a controller. There is no API for it unfortunately, so one would need to send virtual keyboard events through an external app.
I made a proof of concept test with the midi2input tool for linux X11, I found that it only works when there is a small pause between the press/release events.
Then again, if you have a laptop in front of you, using the arrow keys is not that much of a burden after all.

More avenues to explore would be connecting buttons/potis/displays to an Axoloti, Arduino or Raspberry Pi (Been scratching the surface with each :smiley: ) Here you often need additional “splitters/multiplexers” to allow connecting sufficient amounts of buttons or analog inputs. The Pi does not have analog inputs natively.

When I saw the new polyend tracker and it’s price I thought I’d rather buy an old laptop and build some controller for it. I plan to install linux and set it up to load Renoise right away per default. Then sync it with other hardware and jam away.
Renoise is amazing for that. Nothing against polyend, I am sure it is great, I just cannot afford it.

One more thing, the Arduino Mega has four serial ports which can be used for Midi. I bought one but did not find the time to do anything with it. It has great potential for making your own midi merger/processor device.

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I’m in for participating in this.

Totally convinced by the hardware feel of the Polyend. If something like that would be available as a dedicated controller for Renoise it would be awesome. I have also programming background beside music. Are you already started with the development?

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If someone prototyped a basic hardware controller for renoise, I’d be very much inclined to purchase such a thing.

I know I see this idea kicked around every now and again, but it always goes straight to coding a complex bridge using LUA and/or external software to do most everything. Which makes me think, why not build a dedicated MIDI controller? So much of Renoise is accessible via standard MIDI, but no one ever seems interested.

Why not use an Arduino or whatever to control standard keyboard keys on a board with pots/sliders/pads. you could even slap on a touchpad. The standard keyboard keys could use custom keycaps and be programmable. Out of the box they’d be mapped for all of the super useful keyboard shortcuts that I’m always trying to remember.

I’d be quite happy with just 8 decent pads, 25-50 keys (maybe even have a “shift” key and we could just about map every default shortcut to like 3 layers), 12 sliders/faders, and like 12 pots in two groups, 4 and 8, laced out like the Nectar controllers (kinda zig zag), then maybe some more if it seems plausible.

I would pay like 200-400 USD for such a controller. Maybe a bit more if the pads are really really good (i’d be happy with Korg nanoPad pads).

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