Instrument modulation concept

[Bit_Arts]

@taktik

It’s not all black and white and it’s not “them” against “us”.

It’s indeed very unlikely that we’re rewriting the modulation features in r3 within the beta stage because we simply don’t have the resources for this. We are a small team. There are a big bunch of other things we’d like to do for Renoise 3 as well apart from working on the new modulation features. So even if we wanted to, we couldn’t. But we’re also not making up stories here just to avoid changing anything in the current system.

I’d still consider that a mistake, because the instruments are a core competence of a sample player. But I’m not able to change it anyway, so it’s pointless to discuss about this any further.

But we indeed have to make compromises and find stuff that “works”, while you can relax and simply consist on your idea.

If that was the case, me and everybody else would have stopped thinking after the first suggestions, waiting for the implementation. Everyone contributing on topic in this thread is trying hard to find a way that solves the problems or at least helps to AND causes the least effort to the dev-team. Everyone of these guys, including me, is seriously trying to support you and the rest of the dev-team and work towards you. None is just leaning back and waiting for results.

We’re trying to find a solution, looking for ideas of how to improve things - that’s what this whole beta is about apart from bug fixing. Compromises have to be made in this process. Lots of ideas have to be weighted against each others. Saying that we’re simply the bad guys and are fooling people is not true and also not fair.

Well, speaking for myself, I have to say, it appeared indeed like that here and there and quite often specially in this thread. But as I said before, already the simple lack of communications might be the cause of that. And I guess, a more open talk about what’s going on and/or causing problems on the dev’s side would be an important contribution to prevent things like that. Users aren’t clairvoyants. But atm they often kinda have to be, when they’re trying to help.

We obviously care a lot about this Renoise thing.

And you’re very obviously not the only ones.

You also have a quite deep understanding on how such things may work under the hood, yes. But you’re still guessing a lot and do try to sell this as facts. The notes about CPU usage and “redundancy” are for example not true. I tried to explain in a different thread that not the processing of the modulation devices is the main bottleneck here, but the individual processing of the filters per voice (when using filters). Of course running an LFO only once, then applying the output to 10 targets is faster than processing 10 LFOs individually, but when comparing this overhead to what else happens within the instrument, this simply is not relevant, not the main problem, not the main bottleneck, not what makes the whole thing either efficient or slow. So if CPU usage is one of your main concern, then removing this redundancy does not solve the problem.

Well, that’s half of the truth. While I’m absolutely willing to believe you, you didn’t think of the exponential redundancy caused by both redundancy-levels in combination. But it’s there and it becomes huge in no time. (For those who don’t know about the issue with redundant sample processing, this is the related thread.)

I’ve posted about this here earlier in this thread:

An 8 voice unison8 with a quite basic envelope setup (taken from the 303 example) would need, with both redundancy-levels (modulation & sample level) multiplying each other:

• 512 envelopes, 1024 assigned parameters, 128 envelope modulators.

when a proper concept would only require

• 8 envelopes, 32 assigned parameters and 16 envelope modulators.

10 redundant LFOs might not affect the performance. Maybe 20 do neither. But none’s gonna tell me, 512 processed envelopes, 1024 parameter movements and 128 envelope modulators for a single 8-voice instrument don’t affect the performance. This is not a bottleneck caused by filters only. Those might cause the main hit on the CPU. But with each sample layer I use in an instrument, the whole thing becomes more exponential redundant. And it does so on modulation level. That’s happening BESIDE the redundant filtering. When you use several instruments like that in an arrangement, you easily reach a few thousand envelopes and parameters. And those WILL affect the performance. These are facts and nothing I’m making up.

And once again, could we please stop with all this personal “I’m right, you’re talking bullshit” attitude, collect ideas, look for solutions to the problems together instead of building broad based fronts between “them” and “us”?

Actually it’s not about WHO is right, but WHAT is right. I doubt discussions on topic can always be held like carnival in rainbow land. But I agree, “more together” would be nice.