Enviroment
In logic there’s an underlying enviroment in which you can patch midi and audio around as you wish.
Kind of like in reaktor or anything modular. What’s important is that when you work you normally don’t notice it.
Renoise could use this kind of system. What I was thinking was that:
When you create a track like usual it’s patched into the mixer and you don’t see any of it happen.
Effects are of course put before the mixer
When you open up the enviroment you can make use of vsti’s and effects with multiple ins and outs. VST3 anyone drooool
This would of course mean certain changes:
VSTi’s would be bound to certain channels.
Channels would have modes, midi or sampler modes.
Channels set to midi-mode need to be able to route the midi somewhere, that could solve the -problem as well.
Perhaps the easiest way to solve this is to do it like ableton live…
What really bugs me about the Renoise sequencer compared to for example the LSDJ sequencer is that you have to create new patterns just to mute a portion of that pattern. In LSDJ every track has it’s own patterns. Now, I don’t really like this, but wouldn’t it work a lot better if there was an arrangement view. In which you could put out portions of a pattern and not just the whole pattern into an arrangement. The old arrangement system could of course be left as it is, but would be disabled when you make changes in the new arrangement window. By adding such a window to renoise, a lot of possibilities are now available, such as audio lanes.
I know these suggestions might be a bit far out and not all will like them, but I think these are features that could really improve renoise a lot, provided that they aren’t intrusive. A lot of softwares add in new features in a way that ruins a lot of peoples workflow. I think these features, if implemented in an intelligent way, could be done so that nones toes are stepped on.
maybe just give the ‘instruments’ access to the dsp effects.
so you could instead of the whole track: apply effect parameters to the instrument itself.
i really like this idea,it would certainly be powerfull,and i dont think it would "ruin"the way people work in renoise,would like to hear what the developers have to say about this one,it gets my +1
I’ve been suggesting simular stuff a couple of times.
But since Renoise is really a small developer outfit compared to a software like Logic, we need to consider every idea carefully - you know what I mean.
Modular routing capabilities would apply to instruments, effect chains and the sequencer (MIDI plugins), and practically permeates every aspect of the software. So we are doing ourselves a favor by looking at how we attain the workflow - this is, IMO, the single most important point about composing in a tracker, instead of using Live, Logic et al.
Practical questions:
Where would a multi-out VST instrument transmit to? A “reciever” device, or a track?
How should MIDI plugins be implemented? (the DSP chain would be obvious, but it would indicate that only that particular track has midi effects for incoming notes - I honestly don’t know how MIDI plugins work, but I’d like it to work on an instrument-specific basis)
Having patterns of varying lengths: now, that’s another discussion. If you dare, look through (at least) the last couple of pages in the arranger thread, lots of interesting stuff being discussed there
I really hope so …some magnificent plugins like sonicbytes’ era '( bassically a stepsequencer that sends out midi notes and al sorts of data ) can’t be used inside renoise for the moment …Which is realy ashame …
The fruityloops approach is verry simple …specify midi input port for the receiver plugin and do the same for the plugin that needs to send the midi data …
Hope this feature will be implented soon …
cheers
@sns: of course Renoise is able to have these features! I think I can quote one of the developers on saying that “anything is possible”, as he had heard that ‘feature X’ couldn’t be implemented
@gentleclockdivider: yes, it’s a shame about era. But did you check the successor, Phrasor? That one works well with Renoise.
I think it should be patched by default to just transmit the first two outputs into a track.
Then it works transparent and easy by default without the user having to bother with the other outputs.
Then if the user decides he wants to have a go with routing and such it should be possible to route it wherever.
This way attains the original way of working with renoise but you get the routing possibilities.
By default midi plugins would affect whatever instrument is playing on the channel they’ve been added on.
However, in the enviroment it should be possible to reroute all of it.
In the enviroment window it would be obvious that tracks would have “tracker outs” which then go through a default-chain of devices:
The tracker-track output (data) modules
Midi-Effects
Soundbank (this is a default object, this object puts out audio from all the instruments being played in it’s connected tracker-track out module.)
Audio effects.
Note that soundbank objects should not be nescessity. One should be able to route trackertrack out modules into VST instruments directly, binding that instruments to the track it’s connected to.
edit:
I just came to think about one more thing.
There should be several different signal types:
Tracker Notes
Tracker Effect parameters
Audio
Midi
Of course, this would mean that there’d be a need for some utility conversion modules. Another opportunity that arises from this are processor boxes, that allow basic track effects to be re-assigned to midi-cc values for example. Or why not LFO’s that put out track-effect parameters?
Thanks mate!
I will try to make an illustration of how a simple routing enviroment would look like, but running a label, studying and all sorts of stuff always keeps me busy…
I agree that it would be cool to have the possibilities of such a “routing environment” like sending notes to VST FX, but I dislike the routing/environment solution for this. This is overkill.
Logics environment was useful to configure your MIDI Hardware setup - to let the program know how the environment outside of the computer looked like. With virtual instruments this is no longer needed.
Why not integrating the needed routing functions into the Renoise GUI as it exists now? For example: If you want to send Notes/CCs to a VST FX, then the VST FX should show up in the Instrument Panel as targets.
+1 for that
I’ve always wanted it this way instead of applying DSPs to tracks!
Never thought of suggesting it though.
But it may be my way of working with the tracker that makes me want that. I don’t know how it works in other sequencers. Don’t know how to deal with routing tracks/instruments around either.
Anyway, a real nice feature, you could still apply DSP to the tracks “old-style” with this feature.
and what’s more, you could save an .RNI with VSTi-settings and the entire DSP-chain in one go. Or?
