Increase Of Automation Resolution When Rendering To Disk?

Ideas & suggestions
1

I don´t know if this idea is already implemented in Renoise, but since I haven´t found any information about this, I ask anyway.

Is the automation resolution 64 steps on a 64 step pattern, or is i much much higher?

I ask because I have notices some pretty bad volume fades when the volume is very low, and it might be because the volume faded on a slow song if the volume only changed one time every step.

If the automation resolution IS only once per pattern step (64 steps on a 64 step pattern), then a way to increase the automation resolution in the rendering to disk process is to EXPAND the patterns i.e. 10 times and double the speed of the song by the same number of times. This way the automation resolution will also be 10 times higher and more smooth. Since the REAL feature of the rendering to disk feature wait for the vsti/vstfx to finish, I believe that this “smoother automation feature/checkbox” is great appreciated (just in case it is not already done the way in the rendering process…)

(10 x (EXPAND all pattern and DOUBLE SONG SPEED))

Of course this expand and song speed increase only should be handled in memory on a copy of all the patterns, so the user don´t see what is going on.

When using the number 10 it also takes 10 times longer to render a song to disk I guess, but I think it might be worth waiting for, since the perfect-rendering option already takes a lot of time, and computers get faster all the time. The number could be optional in “song settings”, ranging from 1 to 100. It is a song related number and not a “preferences-overall” number, since some song do not use that much automation and therefore should render to disk much faster. Beside that the rendering to disk feature “high resolution automation subroutine” could be optimized by only expanding patterns that actually use automation.

Just an idea
:) Max

2

The amount of interpolation between each automation point is based on the song’s speed setting. If you’re using speed 6 then it’s 6 steps per pattern row. If you want more resolution in your automation, switch to a larger speed value such as 12 or 24, and adjust your song’s bpm to compensate for the slower speed.

3

Thanks for the tip!!!
I changed to speed 24 and changed the bpm too, and the rendered file is great, but it does not alter the cpu load? I thought the automation calculation would take 4 times as much. Are there any settings to edit beside the speed and bpm? or maby my computer and renoise is just so fast that the change is not noticeable.
:) Max

4

I doubt the different settings would really have that much impact on cpu usage. Maybe a little bit but probably nothing to worry about.

As for other settings, there isn’t really anything else to tweak for this kinda thing. The speed value is quite a traditional thing carried over from older trackers, but I don’t think the speed trick will be necessary in the future when Renoise moves away from this old tick-based method (speed = number of ticks per line). In the future I guess we will just have a much more fine degree of resolution.

You can see in other threads like this one:
https://forum.renoise.com/t/a-question-of-speed/12837

… the speed thing has been in discussion for quite a while now.