Faster Automation

Hi!

I have a little suggestion to make automating long sweeps easier:

Wouldn’t it be great, if you could choose the scale of the automation window so that it could display also a longer period of time instead of only one pattern?

I always automate my parameters for a duration of at least four patterns and it’s quite troublesome to automate every pattern separately. If you just could choose the automation window to show for example four patterns at a time, automating would be such a breeze!

Would this be a hard feature to implement?

yes sir indeed!

I think that it is already a great improvement, that the automation curve starts with the last used value from the pre-pattern.

yep. i like this idea :)

.x

Makes sense to me!

I think that with the arranger and everything this would be an obvious feature.

this cannot be done, as you may reuse the same pattern more than once in the patternlist, thus allowing automation curves to be spreaded over patterns would give unpredictable results.

suppose you have the following pattern sequence:

00
01
02
00
03
00

pattern 00 has 64 lines
pattern 01 has 24 lines
pattern 02 has 16 lines
pattern 03 has 64 lines

you cannot associate an automation to pattern 00-and-something-else, since the pattern which follows the pattern 00 can either be 01 or 03, which have different sizes.

The only solution would be to dissociate automation from patterns, but that would be a completely different story

it can be done if we have pattern-events on the one and song-events on the other hand.
song events are independant from patterns and won’t get copied by pattern based operations/duplications, whereas pattern-based events (automations) will.

This reminds me of the automation clips in fruity loops. This would be indeed very nice and maybe, with the new arranger, automation could be easily reused and moved around in the song.

I understand your point It-Alien, but the way I imagined it was that if you made the view longer (ie. 4 patterns) it would just show the automation curve of the next 4 patterns, no matter what those patterns were. If the patterns were the same, then it would naturally show the same automation curve four times side by side.
Then again, if the patterns were different patterns (ie. 1,2,3,4) it would show first the automation (ie. for volume) of pattern number one, then after it automation of pattern number 2 and so on. No matter what the patterns were, you could simply see the automation that they have (if any) and change it if needed. The way I see it, it seems quite simple!

I understand that you’re concerned about what would happen if you use the same pattern in different places in the song, but I don’t think it would be a big problem. Since you could see from the pattern that it already has automation written on it, you would know that it’s there fore used somewhere else in the song. And that by changing that automation, also the same pattern else where in the song would naturally change. So if you wanted to make unique automations, you could simply clone the pattern.

I’m just talking about letting us see a bit further away than only one pattern at a time. I don’t see why it would be hard to do. Am I right or am I missing something here?

hm, why not making some kind of ‘Zoom In-Out’ in the automatation window, so the patternlenght would be the same plus u have a more fine resolution of the automation itself ?

@: shit i missed the whole thread. This always happen to me, if i fly over the words, instead of reading it completly, sry :huh:

notorius the blind

That’s a good idea, which a make unique option available via right mosue click or something. Would just copy the pattern to a new number and change number of original (I know not that hard to do yourself anyway but…)

Maybe grey out sucessive repeats of a pattern at the same zoom level (does that make sense?) So that to adjust it you have to modify the first of that pattern in the view.

Personally, as I know I’m likely to want to add and chance automation, I use an unique pattern in every single position in my song anyway.

Actually just a different colour to let you know it’s used elsewhere in the song, but editable from anywhere is probably a more sensible way…

lol?.. what version of renoise are you using?
“my renoise” continues the automation exactly there, where the previous automation ended. just double click the respective parameter-name from the automation list and you’re set.

Still missing this one a lot! Could it be possible to get a word from the devs about the difficulty of implementing this? Just wan’t to see the automation curve a bit further than one pattern at a time… It would make automation so much more simple! :dribble:

After an arranger is in place, automation will probably be worked into that before long. Exactly when the arranger will appear is anyone’s guess though. It’s probably a priority.