I’ve mentioned it a few times before, and this seems like the time to bring it up again - but with a caveat.
Everyone’s got ‘live’/arranger/sequencer ideas in mind, and that’s excellent, but we all know it’ll be a huge big project for the next generation of Renoise - i.e. not Renoise 2.0.
In the meantime, a tiny optional tweak could be made to the replay behaviour of Renoise that would satisfy a great many Renoise composers who perform their work live (in the meantime, remember, which could be months or years!).
Just to recap:
Currently, if you switch patterns during playback at say line 32 of a pattern, Renoise continues by playing from line 33 of the pattern you’ve just switched to. This means if you want to manually move from pattern 0, your intro, to pattern 4, your chorus (or whatever) in order to play with the structure of the song on the fly, you have to stumble through patterns 1, 2, and 3 - by which time playback is almost ready to move to the next pattern. Epic fail! You now look like a fool on stage!
But wait! Why not have a toggle option to play to the end of the current (initial) pattern you were on before moving to the new one? Patt 0 starts, you get to line 20, you use the keyboard shortcuts (or mouse) to move to pattern 4, and then when pattern 0 is finished, Renoise picks up at the start of pattern 4!
Some of you will think this is an awfully easy concept to grasp, but you’d be amazed how difficult it’s been to get people to understand it in the past. But I HAVE triumphed - pailes, the charming developer of Milkytracker, implemented this at my request as a ‘Live’ mode, which is a small button marked ‘L’ (with corresponding keyshortcut) which toggles this behaviour. I got the idea from AHX tracker on the Amiga which behaves like this by default - probably not an intentional feature, but something that allows me to use AHX as a really versatile live tool.
So please please PLEASE: any live musicians who think that this feature would give them SOME live usability of Renoise beyond just having to stand next to the laptop twiddling a filter cutoff MIDI control - while we wait for what will definitely be an earth-shattering 2.1/whatever superlivehypermegaarrangerninja release, get behind this suggestion for a quick-fix…or just gimme your feedback
Thanks!
p.s. - er…well it wasn’t a caveat per se, more of a qualifier - I just meant to say that Renoise 2.0 is looking great, lots of excellent work’s gone into it, and this isn’t an ungrateful request for a huge load of shit but just a little tweak Put the inarticulacy down to new-version excitement.