The new sample slices are great, but there is one thing I dont understand about them, and that is the automatic creation of “ghost” samples that dont really behave like other samples (cant be moved around freely in the keyzone editor). If there was one key for creating a drumkit of real samples from slices, then this wouldnt be needed.
I think the way it works now could be confusing to newcomers (same samples can be moved around and some cant). It also gives less power to the user. If there were no ghost samples then the user could create and move real samples around freely, and also layer them etc. It would also be possible to play each slice in every key, simply by having one sample mapped over the whole keyboard, and choosing slices with 09xx.
Maybe there is some reason for this that I havent thought about.
Slices are automatically mapped, so that Renoise can automatically update them as soon as you change the slices (add new ones, delete them, reorder them and so on).
We right now also do update all existing notes in the song to make sure stuff plays as before - when possible.
All this is only possible when Renoise takes care of them.
The only advantage that I can see is that this allows you to move the startpoints of the slices around as a sequence is playing (Reordering cant really be done because the samples are ghosted, and deleting a slice means another slice will play too long). Is this important to other users? If I chop a sample I always set the correct startpoint at the beginning and then Im done with it. Are there any other advantages?
Anyway Renoise is awesome either way, Im mostly curious why it was designed this way.
Lets say you start slicing a sample, and create 3 “initial” slices:
Then, what’s not possible right now, map the first slice to C-4 - G-4, second to C-5, third to E-6 (or anything else which is not sequentially).
Later on, when creating/add another slice, Renoise must be really really clever to know where to place that new slice to. Only you know where to place the new slice in such a layout.
Of course it would be possible to let Renoise only update mappings which !can! be mapped automatically or something like this, but this makes things horribly complicated for us, and at the end also is not really transparent.
So right now the mapping of slices may be a bit limited. But it always works, and its pretty easy to understand what is mapped where when creating them.
The other case is remapping existing notes:
Let’s say you created 4 slices and play it like this in the song several times:
C-4, D-4, E-4, F-4 - Drum, Hat, Snare, Drum
If you now insert a new slice behind the first one, and we would !not! remap notes, everything but the C-4 (Drum) would play something completely different. Same applies to 09 effects in the song, when they are used to trigger the slices.
May I suggest that once you are happy with slicing your sample - breakbeat for example , you could “render instrument” in a similar way you can create instruments out of vsti, so that the shadow samples are no longer shadow but actually mapped and cut slices ? the shadow thing is great for quick slicing and tweaking, but i often tend to do more processing on individual slices and you cannot do it with slices, also, i can’t seem to find global tuning of all slices (this was possible in previous version) am I just blind or is it gone ? (if so please get it back, in fact it would be cool if you could apply master commands on every sample within the instrument - such as volume, panning, pitch, or even “process track dsp” applied on all samples would be awesome)
– btw such “global” instrument menu could be made right next to the samples menu which could be opened the same way like the envelopes are now , and mentioning that, would be great, if there was an option to “extend” envelopes to twice it’s width as it seems there is enough of space for it now (at least on high desktop resolution)