Dysfunctional Channel Mutes

Ideas & suggestions
1

Renoise has a totally different way of handling channel mutes than any other music programs I’ve used. Usually the purpose of a channel mute is to prevent the sounding of notes you’ve already entered into the sequencer. But Renoise completely disables the audio for a particular track when you mute the channel.

This is annoying because musicians will often “jam” along with a song to come up with variations for a particular melody or rhythm. You usually accomplish this by muting a channel, selecting the sound in that channel and then jamming on that sound to come up with a new variation. This is an elementary music composition practice… Jamming and tweaking along with the song to come up with cool new sounds. Every musician does this, except for those with a highly programmatic approach to their sound.

However, because Renoise disables the AUDIO for a track when you enable the mute instead of disabling the SOUNDING of sequencer notes, you have to go to a lot of extra trouble to experiment with your sounds while the song is playing… Copying the pattern to a new one and deleting the track you want to experiment with, making a copy of the instrument in a new channel, etc.

If the developers disagree with the above reasoning, could this at least be made an option in the configs?
ie. Channel mute = Mute Sequencer Notes (versus) Mute channel

What do other Renoise users think of this?

Regards,
James Campbell
Ottawa, Canada

2

well… if talk about these things i’d like to see more detailed audio config in general. i’d like to choose interpolation without disabling anything esle, i just to see a button “disable all dsps”, i’d like to see muting of send channels to free cpu, and many many other thingies…

3

There was an old thread about just this… related to live performance I think. The conclusion was that 2 or 3 different ways of muting channels would be nice, but I don’t think a good solution was proposed.

4

Here’s one:

left click - one way
ctrl +left click - another way

etc

5

Hehe… This is almost like chatting now… :)

Another point was that it should really be shown somehow which way the track has been muted.

6

I think the problem could be solved with a note-mute/solo (only muting notes not audio) for columns in a track?!?! :rolleyes:

7

Taktik, Phazzeee, huhuuuuu! This is good point also. I think the best solution would be what aia wrote: Option in config to choose how u want mute to work.

8

I like the idea, but am not sure how this could look like in the gui to be useful. any ideas ?

9

ugly - I know … but useful ^_^

10

muting notes vs. muting channel?

if you mute notes then the effects and the rest still go out right?

in my oppinion this may be usefull for live mixes but for offline mixing makes not much use. but it is my oppinion it is democracy out there :)

11

Alex :
quite simple, but this would work :)

12

I think an option in the config how to mute tracks wouldn’t solve the problem as you want to use the different ways of muting at the same time.

Look at this [old post](http:// this-link-is-no-more-valid?act=ST&f=6&t=949&hl=mute). It lists 3 ways of muting a track:

  1. Mute - left click scope (as it is now)
  2. Kill - alt+left click scopt (as FT2 - when unmuting it again it will start playing on the next note)
  3. Note off - shift + left click scope (just do note offs on all columns which would finish sustains and FX)

This could be shown as text instead of the crosses in the scopes:

Ok I know this wouldn’t solve the problem with muting single columns but it’s still a nice idea.

13

Just discovered another reason why the current channel mute functionality is dysfunctional…

Let’s say you’ve got a long droney sound or a pad/string playing in a given channel, and you want to kill the sound without stopping the tracker. In FT2, you would simply X out the channel for a second and then re-enable it. FT2 would kill the sound in that channel because the channel mutes directly affect note on / off functionality.

But the Renoise mutes work like the mutes on a mixing board, quite the opposite of FT2, Cubase, Logic, Fruityloops, and just about every other music software I’ve tried.

Again, I would like to request that this component be made configurable.

Thanks for reading.

14

That would only be possible with monophonic tracks, since effects are applied to the whole trackoutput, not to one note at a time. So having a track command as you say would be better.