Keep It Real Suggestions List...

Ideas & suggestions
1

I know that there are a lot of cool suggestions on how to improve Renoise.
I have made some of those myself.

But after reading the keep it real topic, I gave it some thought and made this list of features which I think are quite more down to earth.

I have tried to think only of which suggestions I really think Renoise miss or really think would make a step forward and still be possible to implement.

For sequencer editor:

Ability to transpose the selected patterns.

Ability to insert a song/sequencer divider block. (I think IT had this)

What I mean by a song divider is a empty block that you insert between two patterns.
This block cannot be played, and it will make renoise think that it has come to the end of the song and start over at the previous song divider.

It would be something like this:

Pattern:

1 <- Version one of my song a backup of the original
2
4
6

<- Song divider

9
a
b
10 <-These are version two of the song
11
15

20 <- Version three of my song, used to test ideas.
21
22
22
25

<- Dont really need a song divider here…

This is very useful because
it makes it easy to work with different versions of your patterns/song in one song. You don’t have to name all patterns. You can also use it to create buffert patterns or backup versions of patterns in the same song.

Right now its not possible to easily import between two versions of a song.

It also makes it easy to see where you have different versions of your song.
Because the song divider should not look at all like a pattern.

The only way to play the song/patterns that are after or before the song divider is to
manually scroll past the divider.

For editing in pattern/tracks:

Scrolling the content of a track/pattern/selection as wrap around pattern.

Its very useful when you have recorded something into a pattern that you are satified with, the only problem
is that the recording starts in the middle of your pattern and ends at the start of your pattern.

The only way to correct a situation like this today is to manually copy the last part of the recording
into a empty track then delete it, now after that you have to copy the first part of the recording deleter it
and paste it at the begining of the pattern, then copy the last part and paste it into the last part of the pattern.
Now you also need to keep the right distance between the things you copy and paste to get them in the right beat.

I remember Protracker had the scroll option.

Quantize selection

For midi recording:

Overwrite recording-Very useful if/when implemented

If you live record like me and make some misstake, you just continue untill you get it right, you don’t have to go back and delete all recorded stuff in order to record again. Or you don’t have to create a lot of cloned patterns just to get more tries at recording.

Ability to amplify the midi velocity signal. (Modplug tracker has this)
The best thing would be if there could be a curve for this.

Right now everything I record with my midikeyboard sounds to low.

Quantisizing (I don’t want to wait for the high resolution/which I´m not sure is needed anyway, now that the record note delay works so well.)

For disc option:

Save song with samples on disc. (could be called Song, the option that is called song right now could be called module)

Merge with another song/import track/pattern (including samples automations and vstis)

Imports the pattern and instrument from another song and creates new patterns at the end of the current song+puts the instruments into empty slots.

Really needed. Just imaging being able to import different drum patterns etc.

For instruments:
Set default velocity per instrument

For midi

ability to control start/stop /record on/off with a midi controller.

For samples

Record in Renoise.

Ability to set sample offset points. Have been discussed very much.

Ability to set the volume of all samples in a instrument.

For advanced edit:

New masking options:

Apply only to none muted tracks in song
and
Apply only to none muted tracks in pattern.

Is very useful when you want to transpose everything but the drums tracks in a song.

Now there are lots of things I do not think have as high priority here are some…

Merge/split patterns
Would be useful, but very hard to code, because in some cases it would have to merge and cut automation envelopes.

The same reason I also left out ability to cut/copy parts of automations envelopes.
Very hard to code.

Renoise as Vsti
Would help selling Renoise, but does not improve the program itself

Pianoroll:
Hope this comes some day

Coloring of patterns in Sequencer.
Coloring of instruments/effects etc.
Nah not THAT important

Being able to se the samples and automation in the pattern editor.
Not that important.

Ability to mute/unmute instruments in the instrument bank.

Also I think the programers should implement the features/improvements that is the easiest to code first, than the hard ones. Because in most cases I would rather see Renoise gets 5easy to implement useful features than just one, that was hard to implement…

2

IT did not had multisong support, but you could use the no-pattern limiter to create some sort of barrier that it made it look like you could have more songs in one IT-file.
I know some game-engines supported this way of multi-song files, but didn’t remember if this was for IT as well.
However there is no player that supports RNS and there won’t come any.

Other than the previous mentioned reason, I somehow don’t see why you can’t achieve the same results in Renoise using an alternative method.

What’s about adding an empty pattern in the sequencer and entering “------” in the pattern name?
“It should not look like a pattern”. Yeah but does it really matter?
I would not mind wether it should look or not look like a pattern.
A simple range of dashes in the patternname should look clear enough to me what it is marked for.

I think a “start recording upon key-input” method may solve this situation much better. Or actually better said:prevent you have to apply such feature.

Agreed

A lot of MIDI keyboards have at least an option to set a velocity curve of it’s own.

But in some way default velocity levels could be amplified or subtracted using curve-values before entering them into the volume column. Wether it’s easy to implement and if there’s still space for it…
Don’t know.

Agreed (and i already mentioned as a preventive measure)

Strongly disagree.
Renoise does not fit the type of application for recording.
I use tools like Audition or Audacity instead.
They are much better designed for that purpose.
Even if Renoise would support recording in the future, it probably will have some simple recording tool in the sample-editor which a lot of users will see as not enough.
Some trackers in the past had this option though, today i find this pretty useless
Also for harddisc recording purposes:Renoise is not the tool for that.

Renoise claims too many resources for sound-processing alone, if you add recording options, this will consume more CPU power and in some cases (When using samplers with DFD options) also bus-speed resources.
The amount of wanted features should weigh against the possibilities your PC can really handle.

All samples, or individual samples?
I mean, setting the volume of all samples is just using the volume envelope.
And if you require the envelope for specific effects, there’s always the gainer you can apply upon the tracks. (and you can turn those effects on or off)
Or simply use the volume commands in the volume column.

Some features are not nessesary if there is an alternative way to get the effect you really want.
They also cause more reason for confusion when you can’t trace where the hell certain side-effects come from.

Drag the drumtrack to the most right or most left-side of the pattern, select the rest, toggle the “selection” radiobutton and just apply the block-transpose short-keys.
And there you have it: Everything transposed except your drumtrack.
You can alwasy drag your drumtrack back to the spot where you need it in the pattern.

3

You are definatly right about that, I just had to get it of my mind, and did not have that much time…I might edit it…

4

A simple recording feature in renoise is not that vital at this point. I’d find a windows clipboard much more effective.
But in the long run applying audiotracks that stream directly from harddrive and is shown as audiowaves in an arranger. Now thats a totally different story.
That would kick major ass and then of course recording will be much more usefull.

vvoois:

Now that dont make sense to me. If you actually lack resources in a way that you will have problems to record something in the same application. Then there are thousands of things you can improve. Buy a second harddrive. Solo some tracks before you record. And most of all with these features you will have no problem freezing/bouncing your tracks, actually saving a hell of a lot resources.

I remember a few years ago when lots of people complained that renoise used a lot of resources. They compared it against fasttracker and modplug tracker etc. They had problems playing songs on their P90 computers.
Who complains about that now?

Pysj

5

Nice answers

6

You have a good point i overlooked in here.

For dubbing other live channels, it makes more sense to work with a prerendered version of the song / tracks and mix them in a separate application, but with recording from external MIDI devices controlled from within Renoise this can be a pain in the ass.

I don’t know how this could be achieved when rendering the song (processing + realtime recording) But i guess this will be a splitted process (rendering of internal song first, recording of external audio in the next phase and mixing them together in the last phase.)

7

Can’t believe such feature can produce quality audio.
For quick previews this will probably suffice.
But i can’t imagine there won’t be any loss of bits this way…