This is an old problem that I noticed in renoise long time ago, but always forgot to report about it. Actually, you could say “this ain’t a bug, this an usual pan handling”, and yeah, a lot of software use this simple way of pan controlling, but I would say it’s incorrect way, ain’t smart.
Let’s see what’s the problem:
Current pan handling in renoise (no matter where exaclty: gainer, pan row, sample pan, etc) just affect channels volumes: you put the slider to the right and renoise just mute the left channel, you put the slider to the left and renoise mute the right channel. The main minus: you lose the sound volume when there few pan controllers with opposite pan values in the processing way. And there is a lot of pan controllers in renoise: gainer, pan row, sample pan, pan envelope, track pan. For example, if you automate a pan of a track and some of samples in the track got own pan setting which ain’t center then you’ll get volume holes for this samples, the size of the hole depends on amout of sample pan and the automate pan values. If you don’t get what i’m talking about then just put 2 gainers to a track dsp, one of them set to the 100% right, the other one set to 100% left, then try to play any intrument in the track, you won’t hear anything; of course this is a quite extreme example, but in some cases current pan handling just ruins proper sound, especially after import some xm.
Now, what’s I suggest:
The solution for this problem is quite simple: the more panning moves away from the center - the more signals becomes mono. So, if you put the slider to 100% left then the signal will be mixed to 100% mono and you’ll hear it in the left channel.
here is small reaktor made scheme. it ain’t optimized, but it explains how it works:
Pan knob scale: -1 to 1
Crossfade: if X = 0 then 00 goes to Out
Rectify is a simple mathemathical |x|