Doepfer Pocket Dial (endless rotary encoders)

Does Renoise support endless rotary encoders, like the Pocket Dial?

At the looks of it, you can set the channel for each knob, so i won’t see why support would be limited.
You can assign each rotary wheel to a slider function in Renoise.

The technical details regarding the MIDI message format does make me doubt a little bit if the send data will be interpreted right though…
But i guess such device won’t be sold if it doesn’t meet required standards… So i guess it will at least come with some sort of driver that translate the message properly…

http://www.doepfer.de/pd_tec_e.htm

I have a similar Pocket Control that has pots instead of rotary controllers, and it works without problems. I’m guessing there’s some standard message to get the current values of various parameters, but since Renoise probably doesn’t do that, the Pocket Dial can’t know what the next higher or lower value is. The asssigned parameter will jump to whatever value the rotary dial happens to be. Essentially it’ll work just like if you had potentiometers. The increment/decrement thing would probably not be hard to code support for, though, it looks like a pretty good idea, though non-standard.

Or it just sends “one level higher” and “one level lower” like the modwheel on my masterkeyboard behaves.
However Renoise does get the value from the modwheel as soon as i move it, but Renoise does not request the current value when the song is initialised.
On your hardware-synth, this doesn’t matter, but for sending the value to a VSTI, this does matter. (That’s where the effect-column commands or automation curves come in.)

I think the irritation may not be experienced as much as you might expect during your song session, you have to reassign your midi controls every session again.
I could sense that you might have to turn your device off (or deassign the midi-channel of the slider that isn’t positioned correcly to the knob) to set the knobs into the positions of the assigned sliders to make the device work properly, but once set, they will keep track.

The other irritation may be the range of the knobs not meeting the range of the sliders (slider already reached end while still rotating or worse:knob reached end but slider can still go a few mm)

I had a Korg MicroKontrol which has endless rotary encoders. They do work with Renoise. The biggest annoyance though was that if I turned the knob fast, the slider in Renoise increased more than if I turned the knob slowly the same distance… but from what I understood all endless rotary encoders work like that in any program… or am I wrong? I found it very annoying, so this plus the small keys made me switch midi keyboard right away.

There should be a bunch of people using endless rotary encoders with Renoise atm, but they might miss the thread since not as many have a Doepfer specifically.

Okay, edited the topic header to make the rotary encoder idea more noticable.
I’m pretty much interested in the cons and pros as well.