Display As Hex - Volume And Panning In Inst Settings

I was looking for a way to display the volume and panning sliders in the instrument settings to display their values in HEX, just to be speaking the same language when offsetting these instrument’s settings in the pattern editor in the given vol and pan columns.

I remember suggesting this to taktik a while back and I seem to recall it went on the “to do” list.

(edited to keep it simple and to the point)

ping

bump

Bump, again.

Could a dev please respond to this suggestion?

It’s rather self-explanatory and all for the sake of consistency and speaking the same language…

in the pattern editor we can adjust the volume/panning in hex.

in the instrument editor we adjust panning by 50L-0, 0-50R and volume by -INF-12.04DB.

These units of measurement are inconsistent…

Could we please have the option in instrument settings to set/display our panning and volume in HEX? This would conform to the same units of measurement we use in the pattern editor pan/vol columns and make things a LOT more precise when attempting to balance out things going on in the left and right channels.

Otherwise its like working with both US and Metric.

Thank you!

Could make a tool meanwhile that displays hex value in status bar whenever the value is changed.

Good idea. It would be ideal if the pan/vol values did not need to be changed in the instrument settings to get their value in hex…

I’m wondering if it is possible to mod renoise with the given api tools to do this? Otherwise a “tool” would suffice.

I started a thread over in the beginners Lua Api sandbox forum on this:

if anyone is willing to help me (and other renoise users with extreme OCD) out on this.

Thanks

Do you guys actually mean Instrument Settings? Or Track DSPs? The first device relates to Pattern Effect Commands and these I can see the argument for being converted to Hex. Pan in Instrument Settings wouldn’t be a problem either, as it is the same, but Volume works completely differently!

Track DSPs:
-Inf = 00
+0.0dB = C0
+3dB = FF

What values are you going to use for a slider with a completely different range? (Max of +12dB rather than +3dB.)

But you don’t when changing in the Instrument Settings as they don’t apply to anything that is done in Hex!

I honestly rarely set volume using the DSP volume slider so I never realized that the instrument settings’ volume slider provides more amplification than the DSP volume slider. IMHO this seems a bit backwards… I would expect that if anything would be tasked with actually amplifying the volume (louder than the max that can be set by an “80” in the volume column) it would be DSP, but that’s how it is and I’m sure there’s a good justification for it being that way.
The vol column obviously applies to the track (instrument independent) as does the DSP chain, so that’s probably where the logic comes from.

To answer your question, yes, I was originally referring to the pan and volume sliders in the instrument settings tab but since the vol slider’s range there is greater than what we can set w/ the vol column commands this would only make sense for the panning slider in instrument settings.

So I guess as far as I could get with this request is to ask for an alternate hex readout of the panning slider in instrument settings and for both panning and volume in the first DSP device.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to process this request, Kazakore… Much appreciated.

Cheers

Well there could be an argument for using:
0x00 = -Inf
0x40 = 0dB
0x80 = +6dB
0xFF = +12dB

That’s pretty much how the API works for this area with a range of 0-4 with 1 being 0dB (Each 6dB is a double, so double 1 = 2. Double 2 = 4. Logical but took me by surprise when I first saw is as I kind of expected most things to use a 0-1 range…)

But then that would go well against your request to have it tie in with other area…

Ok I think I understand why it took a few days for anyone to even touch this thread.

There is no relation between the panning or volume set in instrument settings, pan/vol columns, Track DSPs or the master track…

Adjusting the panning or volume via the pan or vol columns does not actually offset the vol/pan set in instrument settings… IMO this is weird but it’s obviously been this way for a looooong time w/o much/any complaint. :unsure:

So, set a sample’s panning to full right in instrument settings, nothing you do in the panning column (or dsp panning or master track panning) will offset that panning position, it will simply adjust the volume of the sample in the right channel. I get the logic (it’s like a mixer) but it’s counter to how pre-renoise trackers worked… Obviously it hasn’t really bothered many renoise users any.

I’ll just keep this in mind when using renoise and probably just stick to the rule of setting all my samples in all of my instruments to center pan at 0db in the instrument settings and instead control all panning and velocity w/ the vol/pan columns. There was a lot of charm in the simplicity of how things like fasttracker handled this but I guess if i want fasttracker i should just go back and use fasttracker :)

edit: fixed typo

The Instrument settings adjust the instrument, the sample, the source sound before it gets to any of Renoise’s mixer etc. Panning it to the left would be like feeding a stereo track on a physic mixer with only a left channel. Using the Pan on this mixer would then not do anything to push it towards the righthandside unless you used a Mono (from left) option. Makes perfect sense to me, that’s why it’s called Instrument Settings, it affects the source instrument itself.

like I said:
“I get the logic (it’s like a mixer) but it’s counter to how pre-renoise trackers worked”

that is all.

kthxbye