Hi. I’m puzzled by the way effects are working in a song. I added a filter to a track. It didn’t seem to do anything. I added a distortion effect to another track. Nothing. I added it to a different track that used a different instrument. It worked.
So I started to experiment. I created a new track, entered some notes, and added the distortion effect. It didn’t work. Now I copied the distortion effect to another track, the one in which effects seemed to work. It worked.
So, now I have two tracks: let’s call them Track Weird and Track OK. I enter the same notes in both, with the same VST instrument. Track Weird has a distortion effect, but it does nothing. Track OK has a distortion effect that works.
Now, here’s the funny part: if I bypass the effect in Track Weird and mute Track OK, leaving the effect in Track OK enabled, Track Weird sounds as if the effect had been applied to it! I.e. I have this situation:
This results in the sound of the instrument being distorted.
But if I enable the effect in Track Weird and disable the effect in Track Ok, the effect is not applied.
I guess there’s something I don’t understand. I thought this was pretty straightforward: you have a track that produces sound. You place an effect in that track, and the output of that track is affected by the effect. But that’s not how it’s working. Sometimes the effect has no effect. And sometimes an effect in a different track does (because it’s the same instrument?).
Sorry I just read through quickly but odd things happen when you use the same VST on multiple tracks and use different effects on the tracks, it’s a thing you shouldn’t really do, try duplicate the instrument or maybe an instrument alias will work.
[edit removed the link, sounded like something old fixed in 3.1]
Well, I do use aliases. I tend to use one track for each instrument, but not always, so this is good to know. Anyway, I used the same instrument in different tracks for the experiment. That’s not the situation in the real song (unless I accidentally entered notes with the instrument in other tracks; I don’t think so).
Does this only happen with VSTi instruments? Can you replicate an example using only stock Renoise Instruments and FX and upload the Renoise project file? I’ve run into similar things on occasion, but without seeing exactly what’s going on it is hard to tell.
Yup. If you use Aliases for Plugins, then effects will not work on aliased instances of the plugin (discovered it lately, and it makes Plugin Aliases feature just useless)… Use „fresh” (another) instances of the Plugin (not as aliased one instance).
See here with Delay effect example. It’s for Reverb, Delays and such. But when EQuing one track, the EQ is working on all aliases(!), but should work on current track only. +Faders on tracks: level indicator „LEDs” are not properly working for Aliased Plugins…
The video doesn’t show the Track Scopes or the Plugin panel, so it’s not possible to see what track the alias is actually playing on. Is the Audio Routing perhaps going to the ‘DRUMS’ Group track or the Master track?
I tried re-routing, setting individual (MIDI) channels. Still the same. Effects are just „bypassed” on Aliased Plugin instances… And I can see only this on Audio Routing (no special options to choose between, hahahaha):
There’s no way for a bypass to happen. Effects in a track will be applied to any audio that plays through it. I see from the video that the alias is from Instrument 00, which means it’s likely that that the alias is being routed through the same track, ‘Kick’.
In the pic you just added it shows that this plugin is limited to routing a single output, which is causing the problem. The ‘Audio Routing’ and ‘Plugin Aliasing’ chapters of our video show how this would work with more fully-featured plugins:
Hi again. I made some experiments, and I don’t think aliases are working well. Effects added to one track affect different tracks that use aliases. The problem that made me start the topic was effects not affecting a track, but the opposite also happens, i.e. an effect in a track affecting the sound of a different track. I use two instruments in two different tracks. The first instrument is Kontakt Player. The second, an alias.
EDIT: Afterwards, I changed the second instrument so that it wasn’t an alias. And it worked. So I guess this is a problem with aliases.
EDIT 2: Now I see that if I change audio routing for one instrument, then it affects the other instrument and vice versa. That is, audio must be routed to the same track for an instrument and all of its aliases. If this the expected behavior? If it is, then aliases are quite limited. I’m going to take a look at the video posted by Achenar.
EDIT 3: I’m experimenting with routing now. I see Kontakt Player allows one to choose different outputs for different instruments. I attempted this to solve the problem, with no results yet. But I guess I’m probably doing something wrong. And I don’t understand very well how the audio routing feature works yet.
I managed to add another output to the Kontakt Player instance. Now I have two, st1 and st2. But st2 doen’t show in Renoise when I want to configure the audio routing. Do I need to “refresh” something?
EDIT: here are instructions to creating more outputs in Kontakt:
I found a thread about this here. One of the commenters says: “Any I/O changes you make in the plugin will not get picked up by Renoise immediately. A reload of the plugin will be required, so you may need to save and reload your song in Renoise.” But I have done just that, and the new output doesn’t appear. Any ideas?
Ok. It seems I got it to work. But the names you see in Renoise are not the ones of the outputs you created in Kontakt. But they are in the same order.
