The Gate effect in Renoise still gates audio even when the gate threshold is at its lowest setting (-60 db). When the threshold is at its lowest setting, it should not apply any gate to the audio. Not sure if this is a bug or a design flaw, but the gate in Renoise is too strong at its lowest threshold setting and cuts out sound above the threshold I need to filter out.
Does it work differently on the beta than in 2.8?
@Hazardous!
It would be great if you could upload a simple example .XRNS that clearly demonstrates the problem. This always makes our life much easier when tracking down potential bugs.
It is not specific to Renoise 3.0 beta - it is the same in 2.8. Attached is a small song containing a short sample of the line noise in a direct recording of a guitar. With the gate set to its lowest level, this noise should be audible and indistinguishable from having no gate at all, but instead the gate in Renoise mutes the sound.
The main issue with this is that the gate threshold cannot be adjusted to optimally gate a guitar going through high levels of gain/distortion, as it mutes soft notes played just above this threshold, leading to a stuttering effect instead of a smooth gate. Compare this to a gate effect like GVST GGate, which will pass the noise in the attached example.
I think this is not so much a bug as a design issue - gates will typically have a low threshold level of around -100 db, but the gate in Renoise only goes to -60 db. If you change the gate in Renoise to -100 db, I think this issue will be fixed.
If it was the same in 2.8, changing the behavior could influence backwards compatibility. Just because it is different in an other vst, doesn’t have to mean Renoise’s behavior is wrong?
No, the behaviour of the Gate in Renoise is wrong - the gate in its current form is not particularly useful because it does not have enough dynamic range. 60 db is not enough dynamic range to do what a gate needs to do - it is too high a threshold. I don’t really care about backwards compatibility - quite a lot of the features in 3.0 are not compatible with 2.8, so I don’t see this as an issue at all.
many DSP’s have been updated and their old versions have been deprecated and moved to an invisible group of deprecated devices (e.g.: Filter, Distortion), which can only be recalled while loading an old song, so backward compatibility would not be a problem here.
I never use gates but I reckon that 60dB could be not enough to create a strong gate; an extended range up to 96dB would surely be better; maybe a “non-linear” scaling of dB could help avoiding a loss of resolution in the softer values
An old topic, sure, but this is an issue that I’ve only just noticed now that I’ve started creating more complex gating systems. -60dB is too high for effectively gating recorded material. I’m having to reduce the volume before the Gate then bump it back up again afterwards, which is obviously not ideal.