Huh? what the hell is this thing!?
Just to be perfectly clear…
Use this at your own risk!
As far as I can tell, the Formula Device works pretty well so far, but it is clearly not perfect and there’s obviously a reason why it did not officially make it into the 2.6 release. For whatever reason(s), it is not completely ready for public usage, and definitely hasn’t been completely tested for possible bugs yet.
Just like the LUA scripting that was added in 2.6, this device has the potential to do silly or dangerous things if you are not careful. You may be working on a beautiful song, and then you accidentally cause your CPU to get stuck in an infinite loop with a weird formula, or it might simply crash Renoise entirely. I can’t really say for sure.
This thing is a work in progress… so please be careful with it!
Anyway, the details of the device were already included in the schemas for 2.6 which you all have access to, which I believe is how some other deprecated devices (ie. Filter1, Filter2, etc.) were discovered in the past, so nothing has really been leaked that wasn’t already public data. The Formula Device was already there to be discovered by a really curious person, which is what Suva was cryptically alluding to earlier.
You can for instance create your own type of LFO device with it.
This also means you can add functions that lack in the available LFO device.
One other thing you should know before attempting to break your head on it:
You can’t share variables, constants and events with a Lua tools script.
Even though you can use Lua scripting within the device, there is no internal interaction possibility between the device and the general tool-scripting area. And you also can’t use the renoise specific lua APIs (like the song.API and midi.API) inside this device that you otherwise can use in your lua tools.
not sure what you are talking about, but would like to know? could you point me in the right direction.
also, thanks for the experimental device, will try it out!
Look in your Renoise installation directory and examine the various .xsd files in /Schemas/