Hi, I’ve got an instrument I’ve resumed working on that I’ve noticed problems with.
I think I might have stumbled into some kind of bug or so. Linux 64bit, renoise 3.1 via jack (no dropouts whatsoever while its klicking).
I attach a file with the instrument and a cheesy pattern to observe the clicks. The bass lives by instrument fx processing, it is additive synthesis.
The instrument seems to produce bad clicks when a note cuts another one. While jazzing with the midi keyboard, while building it, it seldom clicked, though a pattern with two notes with no off in between seems to always trigger the behaviour. This also happens in “mono” mode.
What buggers me: there are 9 samples in the instrument. Whenever I remove samples so only 6 are playing, the clicks magically go away. What also works to eleminate the clicks is routing samples into a muted inst FX track or so, as long as there are 6 or less active samples remaining. This is no fix ofcourse as harmonics would be missing then
I thought the maximum samples per keyzone is 12? Can overlapping notes (you see it is play on after loop and some release, with short fade ins and outs in the samples, ironically done to dampen clicks before the breakage even started…) also cause breakage by accumulating the limit?
Please find some pretty answer to this, I was planning to dynamically adjust the harmonics with keytrackers and modulations, so resampling the harmonics would kind of suck for me.
What buggers me: there are 9 samples in the instrument. Whenever I remove samples so only 6 are playing, the clicks magically go away.
Yes, limitation is 12 samples per note-column. So, when you play two (slightly overlapping) notes containing 9 samples, you are (briefly) playing 18 samples in that column.
Since this limitation is per note-column, not the instrument as a whole*, you can easily overcome this by spreading notes over two or more note columns.
The instrument can play 1212 simultaneous samples (or 1212*12, if you consider phrases).
I just made a one-line oneshot phrase in program/transpose mode with 9 note columns, and put a c4 with sample index for each sample into each column.
Now the bass plays the cheesy funk line perfectly without those nasty clicks! Disco feel! And I could put trying to modulate the harmonics back onto my todo list.
But please cosider changing something about the 12 sample limit in future releases so these workarounds aren’t needed anymore, and phrases can be used for their usual purpose. Renoise needs configurable polyphony anyways, also for the opposite case of insts with long decay eating up too much cpu when a lot of very quiet notes build up.
Also the type of click by just abrubtly switching sample playback is very bad, it is a very aggressive glitch/transient.
Could it be that phrases respond to velocity by default regardless of the keyzone settings, and the only way to have them play at the ever same volume would mean to not send velocity to them, or always the same velocity? Is there any way to configure this?