I’d just like to know how you guys (especially linux users) organize your directory structure in renoise. I had setup something that -would- work very nicely for me, with symlinks pointing to everything i need… but unfortunately symlinks are not very usable in renoise, even the full version (this is a BUG, not a missing feature)
So, seeing that renoise doesn’t let you save in /usr/wherever_you_installed_renoise/Resources/* directories (that would be “c:\program files\renoise-whatever” in windows) – because installing new versions will overwrite the whole directory… how do you guys organize your directories in renoise, in a way that quickly lets you load and save stuff?
I have a similar set of folders for instruments (except the samples/drums/* are assembled into kits and live in instruments/drumkits) and all my songs are in a single folder.
edit: Forget to say, I did try naming instruments with tags and throwing them all in a single folder and using the file search filter funtionality (e.g. virus synth res bass.xrni). That didn’t really last very long.
I use the Ill Gates method of 128s for most of my samples. If you are unfamiliar with the idea, it’s basically the Ableton equivalent of taking a xrni and loading a bunch of samples of the same kind into its slots. That way when creating a drum pattern, you can load 88 samples of a particular kind and demo them in the context of the song with your fingers rather then using the mouse and scrolling. I found this really useful for when you need little hats and sound effects to flesh out a section, but don’t really know what will fit well in the context of the other timbers. It’s also a nice way to pack my samples up in a useable format without keeping huge libraries of sounds on my hard disk.
How do you do the 128 method in Renoise? The best I’ve been able to come up with is velocity mapping…but I’ve definitely not founding anything as nice as mapping a hardware knob to the ableton sample selector and moving it around. I like the 128 method and would like to figure out how to do it in renoise.
I guess it is, basically, what I’m about to do for a few key drum elements too now, is:
(e.g.) load a handful of hihat samples into one instrument (128 hihat samples should easily fit in your hand, but renoise instruments handle a max of 120 differentiable sample keyzones though)
click the drumkit key in keyzone editor
When you look for hihats, you load the big hihats.xrni, start programming the drumpatch with C-0, let it run, and just Shift-F2 until you found the best hihat.
I must say NI Maschine is sick awesome with this. I tested it in the shop one time and that workflow is just… damn
Ah cool, good idea. I just went through my samples and created a bunch of these sound menus…pretty cool, super easy to audition sounds and get started programming right away. Here’s an xrni of random perc hits I recorded around my house. No processing, I just recorded a bunch of stuff and cut out anything I liked.
Must say, this workflow idea could use a tool though…
Oh and ontopic: I’m with OP, not handling symlinks is a bug (haven’t tried it myself), but on the other hand linux is probably smallest userbase and even tho most linuxers are coders of some sort and some would probably be glad to fix it for the renoise devvers they are not allowed
What for, specifically? I guess what I could see is something that lets you hand it a bunch of samples, and it creates multiple instruments from those samples. So if you’ve got 240 samples, it automatically creates 2 instruments. Then saves all instruments in one go. That would be slick. How else do you see a tool helping out with this?
Still, this workflow is WAY faster for me than Live, which itself was pretty fast. But in Renoise it’s just drag the samples onto the instrument, save instrument, done. Live has way more clicks. Last night I went through and was able to organize a couple of purchased sample packs into these instrument banks, as well as all of the samples that I’ve taken. I think it took me a little over an hour…very very fast.
Symbolic links on unix-based systems are implemented at the filesystem level, unlike .LNK “shortcut” files on windows, or (i believe) “aliases” on mac, at least pre-osx. They should work in any program unless the program itself decides to check if each file or directory is a symlink, and explicitly handle them differently if they are.
In the majority of cases it’s not the application’s job to take care of this. It’s not necessary, very deprecated, and will only cause nuisance to the user and/or buggy behaviour. (exceptions to this include “find” tools that recursively search through directories, that kind of stuff)
my idea was to have a instrument with possibly over 120 samples, but no mappings, then a tool to take over the samplemappings, allowing you to easily combine (‘layer’) two or more samples, and control relative delay in samples by adding silence into samples, etc., I’m not sure if it’s a stupid idea or can’t really be GUIdesigned for or is genius and could work awesome. In the case of the regular multisample drumkits where every sample has one key, the downside is that transposing different hits becomes more difficult/impossible, and I reaaaaaallly like doing ZXCV drumrolls . aka my workflow depends on that, that’s the part I would consider building a tool for. But not now as I’ve got to study for my computer science exams .
You can do drum rolls by using the retrigger pattern command along with the pitch up/down commands. Set two notes close (I think retrigger only works if the sample is still playing, so super short samples wouldn’t work. Anyway, set the notes close together, then add a retrigger to one column and a pitch up or down. It’s cool, by changing the retrigger value you can get stutters and flams, and with the pitch you can do semitones or smaller. So if you like programming drum rolls I bet you can get something really good with that.
edit: you don’t even need to use the retrigger command, you can just trigger each note directly but still use the U and D commands
I haven’t tried that combo a lot, yet.
I just thought of another solution to my problem/aversion with the “120s”… Just map/layer all to all notes and solo them out with InstrMixer. But that has the problem that you can only have around 12 samples triggered per note so the instruments become 12s. neh…
PS by this I did not mean make a starter setup with 16 kicks, 16 snares, etc… I mean how you can load another hihat sound in the place of another one, prehearing, just scrolling through the directory… awesome
(this is a BUG, not a missing feature)
. aka my workflow depends on that, that’s the part I would consider building a tool for. But not now as I’ve got to study for my computer science exams 
.