i mean the visualization of the seperate tracks is allright to see whether there is sound coming or not, but when it comes to finetuning volume i often find it a bit odd as you can hardly see if a track clips or not. this is really annoying when you got a track filled with something with much dynamics going on, and this somewhat buggers me.
so what about having an actual Level Meter for each track??
doesn’t have to be big, a thin line below/above each track should be enough…
Protracker VU meters were fake, they only reflected the note volume/velocity not the actual level of the sound in a track. I think in Renoise it would be better to have something more visually subtle than Protracker style VUs
first - level-meters within the pattern-ed (like the old trackers) are useless, coz if someone works with more than 8 tracks or a big number of columns for each track you must scroll to get the overview … not the best solution for mixing … why not level-meters at the position of the scopes … so it’s possible to show the levels of all tracks at the same time …
i’ve made a sketch … for my topic … i post it again:
the special thing on this sketch is that the track-level meters should show the master-clipping … the white line is the max. track level … the red double-line above is the overall (master) clipping … and so on …
no … at the white line starts the headroom of the track in view to the master-level.
i think you know the experience in Renoise: you can make a track sound that “shows” clipping in the track-scopes (the wave don’t fit the rectangle and big amplitudes are cutted) but the sound isn’t clipped if you look at the masterscope and you can’t listen to any clipping.
above the white line is the level headroom … and the white line shows the “visual clipping” like the borders of the TrackScopes.
simply … the level-meter should have the feature to show the master-clipping of any single track!
i’ve been thinking about this a whole lot and there’s only 2 details that would bug me about the VU’s.
i woul either want:
a split VU showing each channels stereo levels.
or.
have the VU split into like 8 so you can have a level meter for each sub-track.
a single VU bar was ok in IT because it was mono. (i guess there were no bars for nna’s so i could be convinced that the individual sub-track bars are overkill) but the panning scope i could actually use, there’s nothing that tells you how stuff in eachtrack is panned (unles you mute everything else and look at the master stereoscope). maybe the modPlug (ugh! sorry, seeing that word nauseates me, too. ) style tracktop VUs that throb in two direx to give you a stereo one.
to all who don’t understand that level-meters are very important:
level-meters in Renoise should not only a funny flickering thing like in protracker, soundtracker, med or other old amiga/pc-trackers … level-meters could be a really important utility to check the volume and clipping of tracks … level meters are USEFUL for mixing in a visual way … the track/masterscopes are nearly useless in Renoise for mixing in visual way - that’s my opinion.
maybe trackers weren’t designed to do the final cut and mastering - ft2 didn’t have it. but most didn’t complain, since many multitrack tools out there have this feature. well now since we’re talking pro quality here, maybe the track scopes (or the new mixer?) should have it.
left/right channel hmm… maybe we should just take the r.m.s value
) style tracktop VUs that throb in two direx to give you a stereo one.
Left/right is damn important IMO. A mixer would be an awesome idea!