I am brand new to Renoise so execuse me, if my question is stupid.
I’m running Renoise on Fedora 33. When I’m loading a sample, I can start playing it by pressing the button on the upper left. Unfortunately I am unable to trigger playing or stopping it by using the space bar.
It seems to me like the entire keyboard is disfunctional. When I’m for example trying to adjust the pattern length, I double click into the field, which marks it as selected, but trying to type a new length leads to nothing. The selection remains unchanged.
Same thing when I try to copy and paste a sample using ctrl-c and ctrl-p.
So you can play and hear the sample with mouse controlling at least?
I don’t think you can play samples by default with spacebar. Your keyboard letters are assigned as keys and they can be used to playback the selected sample. Make sure the loaded sample is active and selected from the instrument list and try to toggle record mode off in case you still don’t hear anything by pressing the letter keys.
Take note what’s the difference between an instrument and a sample. An instrument can bundle many playable samples inside and apply different effects to them. Your instruments should be listed in the main view on the right side. Click on the instruments with MB2 and see what options are available in the drop menu. There should be a visible keyboard hotkey next to the action, and if not, you might be able to set one from the global preferences.
Take also note that in Renoise you need sometimes need make different parts its GUI active by clicking different sections of it with Alt+MB1. The active area gets highlighed with yellow borders by default. This means that now the active section responds to your keyboard hotkeys. So let’s say you want to copy and paste your instruments in the instrument window / list. Well, then you must make the window active first so your hotkeys get applied there.
Loading a sample to instrument slot using the file browser should assign the sample to be playable with all keyboard letters, but this information can be further modified in the instrument’s properties through key and velocity mappings. You should be good if you just use the default file browser from the main GUI. Another thing you might want to test is switch Renoise to fullscreen mode with Alt+Enter and see if that affects the way your keyboard inputs gets recognized.
I am using Linux as well and the keyboard playback is a bit weird sometimes with VSTi plugins, it does not work the same way in Windows.
Yes, Renoise keyboard shortcuts are very closely tied to working context. Copy and paste in the sample editor will copy and paste selected sample data inside of the active sample. Copy and paste with the samples list selected will copy and paste entire samples (and their associated settings).
To play the currently visible sample as-is, use Return/Enter instead of Space.
I just realized that only the first keyboard action is executed in Renoise after making the window active. This is really weird.
So when the song is playing and I re-activate the application window, the next space bar hit will stop the playback. The next spacebar hit will not start it. When changing out of the application and coming back to it again, the next space bar hit will start it. @wabe full screen mode does not change the behaviour.
Play around with the keyboard shortcuts. There’s some weirdness going on with the stop/play as I think there used to be a different separate option for that specific behaviour all together. I use space for stop and enter for play song from the current pattern (shift+enter for playing from the active row).
Thanks for your replies. I just found out, what the problem is: I’m using the Wayland Display Server on my notebook. When starting my session using X11 the problem does not occur.
Do you think this may be of interest for the developers?