that’s an issue I encountered when I was converting one of my older songs to the 2.0-format.
To reserve compatibility it seems that Renoise keeps the old DSPs in your song once you convert it to the new format. But once the user decides to have her/his song converted, - and she/he’s been kindly warned after pressing that button - then I think it’s rather a favour to exchange old DSPs with the new ones and map the parameters.
What’s the benefit of it you might ask.
First of all, even though old FX are kept inside Renoise as a hidden DSPs to meet old standards, an older song using some of them (e.g. Filter2) will sound differently in Renoise 2.0. So one would have to renew his song by hand anyway to keep it working in the new Renoise versions.
Sencondly you’d do a big favour to the composers if you’d just map all the automations/pattern commands/LFO-device-relations to the new DSPs. That’s done way faster with a couple of convertion functions than by hand.
Thirdly maybe in time you can have one unit that is responsible to map parameters to new items and instead get rid of many old units. So far I can imagine that you kept on porting Filter1, Filter2 and the old mpReverb to the new Renoise versions. And maybe even the old Compressor (the one with the buggy RMS feature).
I agree with all the 3 posts. What Gilli has proposed is really useful, and it surely should be an option, not everyone wants to convert old DSPs to new ones every time (they don’t behave exactly in the same way). Converting to newer versions of VSTs would also be very handy and time-saving.
The only thing that comes to mind is that what if the user wants to upgrade just a certain old DSP to the new one, not all of the DSPs? Should each DSP have an option to upgrade individually? Seems a little weird…
If you just want this because of this bug http://www.renoise.com/board/index.php?showtopic=18335
then no. This is something which simply needs to be fixed. If we keep the old devices, the devices should sound as they used to be, for whatever reason do we keep them then?
We’ve worked our asses off to make old songs sound as they used to sound in older versions, so lets solve this little detail as well.
Nah, sure I also had the other thread in mind when I wrote this and after having read your answer, I was assuming that you’d not fix it (which would also be okay). I shouldn’t have mentioned it if it came over as an attack. And be sure I do respect the work you do to keep old songs sound the same in new versions. Why else would I care to report any issues I find in the native sound engine (since five years from now)?
I thought about this scenario that someone wants to benefit from the newer DSPs at places where he used older ones earlier. Now there is this handy button (I know it’s a lot more to have all the functions behind it) and it does warn the user about the changes it will do to the song. Considering the optional version mentioned by now, why not offer the ability to have parameters mapped to new devices?
Anyway, it was just a suggestion I thought some would find useful. Not worth the hassle if you have different thoughts.
Heck, no. I haven’t seen this as offense. Just wanted to point out that if there are any pending compatibility issues, we should fix them instead of adding workarounds.