The metronome clicking gets re-initialized on every pattern. I would expect the metronome to have a constant pace even when pattern lengths and metronome settings don’t really “make sense”.
Nothing changed for Renoise 3 here. Pattern highlights also restart on every pattern and metronome precount on pattern starts would not make sense then. An intro pattern which is not a full bar would mess up every following pattern’s metronome timing as well.
I believe it would be expected that you put your bars accordingly in such cases, and that the metronome is always song wide and initialized at the very start.
Say you just wanna use the Renoise metronome in the background while fiddling live in an odd time signature. You’d have to set up a fitting pattern length beforehand.
But yeah. Maybe you have made the best compromise, but it might be percieved as an oddity. Also you might not wanna put time in coding song wide tracing of metronome position unless more people are complaining 
How should a song-wide metronome behave in odd sized pattern mixes if you decide to start from an arbitrary position in a pattern on a random sequencer position?
I used epic arpeggiator to generate a specific metronome track (perhaps V2.x still converts properly in API 4.0) if i were working with such different pattern size arrangements, but when triggering from random places, it could still get pretty confusing sometimes.
vV,
Imo, the best premises are as follows:
- Playing a song from beginning to end should result in a constant metronome pace all thru.
- Playing a song from pattern X should ‘backtrace’ the metronome from where it would have been if you played the song from the beginning.
- If jumping around (via scripts or queueing?) the metronome should still run at a steady pace.
In other words, the metronome is ‘set’ whenever you initialize playback and will not change until it’s stopped.
I was testing something in Lua regarding steady offset, but keep running in the same pace from arbitrary positions cannot be scripted reliably however (gpu refresh vs realtime requirement).
Anyway, I think the current behavior is quite nice and gives some additional flexibility. I just brought it up because it is a little bit quirky.
There could be switch in preferences, “song-wide metronome” or “pattern-wide metronome”, but it might be overkill implementing unless people really want it.
I was mainly concerned of how new users or purists react to the current quirkyness 
I’ve posted on this in another thread, but the metronome in Renoise is terrible if you stray outside 4/4 or 3/4 time signatures. For people like me who write a lot of stuff with constantly shifting time odd signatures and tempos, the metronome in Renoise does not work very well, especially if you want a precount before recording.
I currently work around Renoise’s inadequate metronome by creating a metronome track and manually placing metronome sample beats in each pattern, but this is a lot of work for a large project, and there is still no metronome precount when you do this, and it does not put pattern highlighting where you need it.
It would be better if each pattern could be explicitly assigned a time signature which affected not only the metronome, but also the metronome precount, so if you start playback/recording in a pattern, you hear the correct metronome. Hearing a 4/4 metronome when the pattern is in 7/8 is not ideal.
The metronome (and pattern highlighting) needs to be assignable to each pattern (preferably via a global FX command) and support more time signatures than 3/4 and 4/4, not buried in Edit > Preferences > Audio.