It’s both. It’s a toy to have fun with and make professional music.
I don’t know how you define “fun” but automating parameters in renoise is a fucking sick joke.
Well, thank you for your incredibly constructive feedback.
With all due respect, sir:
Nothing I say, however constructively formulated could possibly help THAT complacent of a developer see the forest from the trees.
The constructive feedback was already given, you replied with that “toy” nonsense, showing NO acknowledgement of the issue or suggestion. You pretty much should expect to piss off customers with that kind of answer, dblue, come on you’re a smart guy.
It’s a slap in the face and an insult to those who wanted to help support renoise’s development cycle by purchasing the software to give it a fighting chance in the marketplace to respond to user feedback in the way you did here. Coming back to renoise after a year of not using it due to other workflow issues I had with it to see this on the forum when searching for hints on the same topic just makes me wonder what happened to renoise and the passion that the devs (mainly taktik) seemed to have in the earlier years of the application’s development.
If you want to make a toy to have fun with - that’s GREAT! Just don’t sell the product or put up a user forum for feedback.
Oh come on, man. Gimme a break. Nobody is insulting you or slapping you in the face. If you genuinely feel that way, then you’re reading far too much into a few very simple words. I wasn’t being complacent or trying to dismiss the idea in any way. I was simply giving a short answer to an equally short question. It’s really not that complicated.
Quite frankly, if you’re not having fun with Renoise and enjoying it - as you might enjoy playing with a toy - then you’re doing something wrong, in my opinion. What’s the point of even making music if it’s not to have fun? What’s the point of music software if it cannot provide you with a fun experience in some way? I know I sure have fun when I use Renoise, as do countless other users, clearly. But, I obviously don’t think of Renoise as some silly gizmo like a Speak’n’Spell or some shit like that 
So I stand by my original words: Renoise is both a fun toy and a tool for “professional” music creation (whatever the hell “professional” means these days). When I want to blow off some steam and relax, I load up my awesome musical experimentation toy: Renoise. And guess what, when I want to do some serious bizness (!) musical work, then I also turn to the exact same damn tool: Renoise.
Renoise is not perfect (No music software is!), but we are constantly trying to listen to our community and make improvements over time. We try our best to implement what seems to be most important to the majority of users, but, yes, sometimes we might get this wrong. We’re only human, after all. We’re a tiny development team, and we can’t possibly implement every single suggestion ever made by anyone on the forum. It’s tough as hell to weigh and prioritize all this stuff and figure out what’s truly important to most users. So please cut us some slack here.
Comments like “ is a fucking joke” don’t help anyone, especially not us. We can understand your annoyance that a certain feature might not be implemented yet, but, honestly man, it’s completely pointless to jump into a thread that’s more than a year old and offer absolutely nothing positive or helpful to the discussion. Please simply try to express your ideas and give feedback in a constructive manner, and try to add something of value back to the discussion.
If you feel passionately about something, then make your voice heard in the appropriate place. Post something to the ideas and suggestions forum and explain why you need this thing, what it should do, why it would be cool, etc. If an existing topic already exists (as in this case), then give it a gentle bump and express why you think it needs to be added, and try to add something to the original discussion. Don’t simply disappear for a year and then come back to say “this is a fucking joke”.
You feel me?
For what it’s worth, I want this same damn feature myself. Hopefully we can work something out.
Hey Dblue, thanks for the reply here. been busy crankin away at my efforts for the RPM 2013 album-writing-in-a-month marathon… gearing up for February was what brought me back to the renoise forums to dig for the status of this feature request. It’s an ancient request which seemed to stop dead after your (c’mon dude - admit it) smug post about professional toys…
I want this same damn feature myself
Brilliant… could you not have saved a few people’s frustration and just said this from the beginning? Put it on your to-do list, keep us posted on the progress and move forward.
moving on!
As in, “toys,” made out of plastic, or something that you would find at Toys R US.
A tool is a tool is a tool. Real professionalism is found in the person using/creating with, or creating/inventing the tool.
I’m not about to let you cut my hair, because you have a scissors…
Keep that in mind. Cause owning a pair of scissors sure doesn’t make you barber, any more than owning a Porsche makes you a great driver.
Your passion, your heart, and your inner talent… That is where your music is from.
Renoise is a professionals tool. because professionals use it. Its missing an odd feature here and there? So are a lot of, “professional tools.”
Edit = aside from all that. Music is fun.
+1
Well, I just feel compelled to say that I’ve been LOVING Renoise’s Points automation lately.
Particularly because I’ve been using Renoise to automate video loop start positions ( using ImXIntel - http://image-ine.org/ ) where I don’t need/want linear or curved envelopes,
and I have to tell you; it’s been A LOT of fun.
Automating the CC value I sent to ImXIntel to control the video was a BREEZE to set up using Renoise’s External MIDI instrument option and the it’s native Instr. MIDI Control DSP.
It was actually VERY quick to mash up the video using Renoise and the automation zooming and Paste Continuously features were incredibly valuable and worked great.
This track and video (silly as it is) was made with Renoise and ImXIntel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYhmK4i7Jkw
cool. you’re missing the point… seriously no pun intended.
we’re requesting a midi learn feature so one does not need to scour through the potential hundreds of automation parameters some VSTs provide. If we had midi learn (like many other DAWs have) you would not need to scroll through a list to find the parameter… you’d just hit learn, move the knob and your parameter would be highlighted in the list of parameters.
besides this yes i find renoise quite awesome and fun. always have. not the point of this thread.
Oh I get yah, it’s just that; your comment (the way you worded it): “I don’t know how you define “fun” but automating parameters in renoise is a fucking sick joke.” kinda comes across to me as a generalized/blanket statement that doesn’t seem directed towards any specific aspects of Renoise parameter automation (like the thread topic - MIDI learn), but instead seems directed at all of aspects of Renoise parameter automation. Essentially what I’m saying is your statement seemed very general, or all encompassing; so I was responding to that by attempting to point out something I love about Renoise parameter automation. Nevetheless I now see you didn’t intend your comment/statement to be taken/understood the way I did.
I agree with mSepsis. At this point in life I even agree with his tone. I have the same feelings towards the “current state of things”. I don’t think anyone has to apologize for their feelings. Constructive feedback is not endless patience. Constructive feedback is not unconditional love. It’s a fucking mess of yes men and vampires, sucking. One can have expectations and the other doesn’t get to decide where to meet them.
That said, couldn’t some variation of this idea be scripted? Combine a temporary midi dump with plugin_properties and the status bar? Something like “You just turned the Param365 knob…” Not the best solution, but a prototype could at least show it’s possible and fairly trivial?
Regards,
Well, good luck in deciphering the plugin mumbo jumbo binary data that gets changed.
If it would be that simple, somebody would have whipped up an answer.
The only one who i have ever seen attempted some messing with plugin chunk data was Danoise and i suspect he simply observed what part of the chunk changed when he changed a certain parameter, in that regard it is simply change that chunk part to whatever it got changed to to get that particular value and you needed.
Or Taktik is willing to give some explanation how plugin data chunks are build up and how they could be decoded.
It looks like some Mime encoding, but i’m not sure.
I dunno. Sometimes people don’t even bother to try the simple things…
One approach could be to take a snapshot of all the values of plugin_properties. Then, the user clicks a Lua button that says [Go]. Then, when you move a knob one of the plugin_properties will have changed and all the others would not have changed. With that data, you can easily conclude that “Param365” was turned.
Problem: Sometimes you have an oscillator that constantly shifts values. You could compensate for this by taking a dozen snapshots when the user presses [Go]. Then you see: analyzing. Then: ready. Then: User moves a knob. Anything that was already changing is disregarded from the data set.
An so on.
I don’t think any apologies are needed either. This is a forum, and miscommunications should be expected. What I think is valuable though; is to express how we interpret each other’s comments. That’s all I was trying to do. Perhaps I could have thought a bit more before posting my I LOVE THE POINTS AUTOMATION! comment and realized mSepsis was really just referring to MIDI learn, but then again, I was expressing my feelings too.
That’s precisely the problem with a lot of VST plugins, they don’t have their parameters properly named. There are even plugins with parameters that have no name at all or share the exact name as multiple other parameters.
You won’t find shit with those plugins and if you find something you don’t want to play the memory game until you found the exact matching parameter (or figure out your parameter is not controllable at all).
The last changed parameter coloring sounds like a good idea, i consider it a tad bit better if Renoise would automatically select that parameter for you in the dropdown that you marked for learning when you toggle it.
The colouring trick sucks if the specific parameter has no name at all and is surrounded by other empty parameter lines.
bump hopefully this hasn’t been lost in the disagreements…
to answer dblue’s questions:
- why you need this thing
Automating complex synths in Renoise is hard. Synths like Zebra have hundreds of parameters and they’re not very well named. When messing around with it, I’ve seen four different “cutoff” parameters, none of which are the main filter cutoffs but instead are cutoff parameters inside of other zebra modules.
It’s possible to do this with midi learn, and I have. However, midi learn is global across all instances of zebra (and this is the case with many other plugins). So if I midi learn a parameter, write in midi pattern effects, and then change zebra’s midi mapping somewhere else, my original midi pattern effects will be broken. Consider the case where I write a song, and then a year later pull it up. If I’ve changed zebra’s midi mapping at some point in that year, in a different project, then I’m going to have a hell of a time fixing my song.
Instrument automation is protected against that problem. The automation happens directly between host and plugin, rather than happening via midi CC. It is possible to do this sort of automation in renoise with zebra, but very very difficult and frustrating and so the common response here is to use midi CC, which works but has the caveats above.
- what it should do
Instrument Automation device should be able to see the most recently changed synth parameter. Instead of a long list of params, there should be a button that says “map automation” and when I move the cutoff knob in zebra, a new automation param is defined, linked to the filter cutoff.
Ableton live has the best implementation of this that I’ve seen. Load in a plugin, click the “configure” button and now it’s ready to learn about new automation parameters. If you want a video of this I will track one down, I’m just hoping that people here are familiar with how Live does it.
- why it would be cool
Automation and pattern effects in renoise are truly amazing, and coupling them with a powerful synth like zebra would just be insane. I have a bunch of plugin instruments and effects, and they all support host automation, but at this point the host automation is a pain. It’s a pain worth going through because renoise is so powerful in other areas, but I’ve seen how simply other hosts handle this issue and think it would really open renoise up more to the world of plugins.
Thanks for the consideration 
hrm, so…it turns out that zebra has the useful XY parameters near the front of the list of published parameters, so they show up in instrument automation devices. You then map cutoff to one of the XY pads instead. For synths that have these sorts of dynamic modulators, I can spend a bit of time setting up an instrument automation preset. Looks like no workaround is needed…I just need to do a prep work rather than doing it all on the fly like I’m used to.
although in this case it would be great to be able to label each of the parameters like you can do with instrument MIDI control, because the synth’s labels aren’t always great
http://www.renoise.com/tools/getpluginparams
With this tools Renoise is not so far away from FL studio process of automatization.
I’ve had this exact problem trying to automate the vocal filter lfo rate in arturia’s minimoog v2. Arturia makes great vstis, and they NEVER have all of their parameters labelled correctly. I’m not sure if that’s the problem with this minimoog, or if it’s impossible to add all the possible parameters into the spaces renoise provides. I’m sure it’s not number 2, because I’ve loaded up the arp2600 vsti and there’s nearly twice as many parameters listed for that synth. SO, YES I’m going to throw my hat into the midi learn/better instrument automation feature, because to be perfectly quaint, a lot of other DAWs are a joke when compared to renoise, so I’ll be looking for it, yeah? Meanwhile, I’ll give the previous poster’s solution a shot.