It would be so helpful, if there was a quick way to make A/B comparisons also in generators…! If you design a sound and last steps weren’t good, you have to use undo. This is sometimes quite frustrating.
BTW. undo in VSTs takes imo too much little inertia steps of a control movement using the mouse. Could it be just the value on mouse button release? E.g. on some plugin I move just one control up and down and suddenly there are maybe 20 steps in the undo history… So it’ starting to get complicated if I want to go back to a special point of history. I have to stare at the control and also at the tiny status text. This breaks the flow!
The plugins are sending value changes. This behavior may differ per plugin, some plugins decide to wait until all movement ceases for a minimum amount and some plugins simply allow realtime following of plugin changes (meaning Renoise gets constant updates and yes:each update seems logged as an undo record)
Undo could be far better optimized indeed (grouping parameters and individual actions for it and having this undo history table where you can go a lot further back in the list to undo multiple changes in one go.)
If you are doing that on a control inside the plugin, there is no such event Renoise can trap. Basically the only thing possible in that scenario is listen to the parameter stream and only register the last incoming value of each parameter for each undo level.
Then Renoise would still not know which parameter it was changing or if it was changing a parameter that was sent at all… (a plugin sending LFO signals and custom changing signals both together is not distinguishable)
A/B profiles would work out best. Since the Instrument Automation device has it, the only additional thing this device needs is a feed-back and learn checkbox and a radiobutton before each parameter so that only one can respond to the change and attach itself → Renoise having a learn and synchronize mode for plugin parameters.
This would solve your A/B profiling idea as well as it solves the issue that people would have to figure out which parameter description belongs to which knob.
Hm, much more cool would be A/B buttons directly in the bar of the GUI window + the instrument settings and NOT over instrument automation device, since I would have to fiddle out what parameters I will change first.