Yes, I’m sure this has been suggested before. An idea—a dream—maybe of one, but maybe of many. One who loves the endless possibilities for sound design with automated Renoise effects, but finds himself using it more like a single instrument due to its lack of a horizontal timeline editor. Effect automation is killer… but when it’s only limited to 512 beats? Sometimes, it breaks my heart. And while I love the grid, sometimes you just need to break out of it and find endlessly scrolling, non-looping horizontal freedom.
A dream? Yes. Crazy? Maybe. Will I see this day? Who knows. The day I am able to use Renoise as my one DAW and only will be a day of joyous celebration, for it will always be the DAW that beats closest to my heart.
You can scroll the automation window out to the length of the full song with the mouse wheel, then use the line tool to cross pattern boundaries. Or do you mean the pattern fx?
So what makes you think adding one more copy would speed up the development of this feature or perhaps it may not even be developed at all as the main idea is to be different from the main-stream…
Yeah and save your default song as a 1LPB song with 512 patterns, 512 lines each. That will get you pretty close to ‘infinity’ of time-space that you seem to get in regular daws.
PS, if the API gets “custom GUI canvas drawing” in 3.0 you can solve all your problems yourself!
legendofzeke might be right - at least, when talking about the automation part
I can’t be the only one feeling that working with automation across multiple patterns is painful in Renoise, even if we have a workaround such as the line tool…
But then, I’d personally rather see the ability to seamless edit envelopes, and view them side-by-side (stacked) before anything else.
@legendofzeke: I can’t help but to think that you might benefit from controlling the tempo with pattern-commands, when doing this sound design work. You can squeeze an amazing amount of sound into a single pattern if using non-linearly progressing playback. And automation envelopes have got a crazy amount of precision, once you turn of “snap to lines”.
I agree there is certainly room for improvement here. We already have horizontal automation in renoise in it`s current form, so like you say stacking the lanes up makes a lot of sense.
Also if we have the line tool crossing pattern boundaries then other methods should be implementable too.
I don’t like restricting my thinking with patterns like “trackers are vertical, so every data visualisation in Renoise should remain vertical”. It’s silly. Sounds and events are triggered in time, there is no conflict in plotting them vertical and horizontal at the same time as long as those ways of presenting the data are compatible. And it’s already in Renoise - automation is horizontal, envelopes are horizontal. Looking at this from the other point of view, there is nothing against implementing tracker editor for traditional daws. It should work because it’s just how we visualize data - the data remains the same.
While pattern matrix gives a nice overview of the song and improves sequencing I still could use more traditional approach to sequencing - think of ableton style sequencer where blocks represents patterns as we know them now. For sequencing it would be a lot more intuitive, in my opinion. Same for audio tracks - I never understood how vertical audio tracks could help other than visualize at what position the audio track is at the moment. But that’s only my point of view.
Well, the whole concept of “vertical” notation in trackers is, we (mostly) write from left to right… so a note+octave+inst.number+volume+fx will of course take more space horizontally, unless you write it vertically - which would make it cumbersome to read. Therefore, aligning them vertically is the way to go, unless you want a ridiculous amount of channels x a few notes per channel on screen at once.
Envelopes, automations, waveforms, etc. do not have this problem.
Very much agreed =)
DOH!! Then tilt the top 1/2 of your screen back the other way, and …uh you might need a chainsaw for this :3 :3
imo, it’s called good ui design. if you try to please every user in the world then, in the end, you’ll have a mess of a ui.
try working with a 30 seconds long vocal take in renoise for example. it’s not a good experience at the moment imo. trying to nudge a transient just a few milliseconds is not practical. it’s important to be able to “read” the wave along side all the other music events.
You play the guitar. You play the piano. You play the flute. All three are wildly different interfaces to producing sounds. But, you put all three together to make a song.
It’s the same for our beloved pattern editor. The pattern editor is great for editing a single pattern.
That doesn’t mean that the interface translates to all other aspects of producing on a computer.
