Live setup

Tips & Tricks
1

Ok, this is gonna be a bit different:

I was looking for ways to use dsp effects with my microphone while streaming (on twitch.tv). Turns out there are very few options, and i didn’t find one that was satisfying. So i wondered if i can setup renoise in a way that would enable me to do things. And to a degree it does:

I have several channels now setup with different effect chains. Each track has a #line-in component and a gate behind it to cut of some soft background noise. The master channel has has a compressor and equilizer to prevent sudden spikes and overall level the audio.

Some of the tracks i setup just have a basic reverb or delay, some distortion. you name it. Lots of possibilities there.

To use a certain ‘preset’ i just Solo the track in the mixer, and i have the settings i desire.

I can then have renoise output the signal to a virtual audio cable, which is then used as recording device source in my streaming software. So far so good.

Ok, now here are what i have problems with:

  1. Using the #Line-in component has a delay that feels around 200ms, despite the latency in the Audio preferences being at 5ms and the setting on the #line-in component being on live recording mode. Same delay happens on the sample recording.

For reference, i’m using a Blue Yeti usb microphone.

  1. In order to use the different presets effectively i need some way to switch between them on the fly. Pulling up renoise, solo’ing a different channel and switching back to whatever i was doing is not gonna cut it.

I set up a script so i have a new dialogue window with buttons for each preset which solo the corresponding track, but the way renoise is set up, as soon as it gets focused, the renoise main window is focused as well, which i then have to minimize again. not ideal either.

The second thing i tried is setting up hotkeys in the script since i glanced over the key preferences, read “Global” and thought, hey global hotkeys, that would be it! Turns out, Renoise’ global hotkeys are global within Renoise only, not system wide.

So far the whole thing seems less than ideal.

If you have any ideas on how to improve the latency or the preset switching, or even can suggest an entirely different program for that, since renoise isnt exactly made for this kind of usage, please let me know :slight_smile:

2

the delay might be down to windows audio driver Directsound…changing over to ASIO might be a better option but you would run into problems with your web browser not recognising your asio driver, or your virtual cable not being able to take audio from ASIO and converting it to directsound for another program…,the switching presets could be solved with a cheap midi controller as midi will work even if renoise is not focused…

3

Using a midi controller is a great idea. I was for a longer time now toying with the idea of getting a korg nano or such, so that would be cool.

For Asio, i did for some time play around with asio4all when i plugged my guitar into my line-in. The problem it created was that only renoise was able to use the sound driver then, no external backing tracks. Nothing else would make a sound. Since, when streaming, i’ll always have at least 1 additional audio source that is playing in the background, whether it would be music or a game or smth else, that would be a kind of roadblock for this.

I’m not sure how this generally works if i had an audio interface. Am i still able to use several audio sources then or is the interface limited to playback only one source at a time as well?

4

If you had an external soundcard, even a simple one with 1 input and a headphone out, you should be able to use that with renoise through asio then take the headphone out with a lead and plug it into the input on your built-in soundcard which is using directsound…that should give you better latency with renoise, but I believe there is a built-in latency with directsound as it’s only for playing music x games etc…I imagine it would be tight enough though as all the intensive dsp stuff has been done on the external interface…