I’ve been using Renoise for some years now and I love it. I owned a maschine MKII and I sold it to get a controller to use renoise on linux as my main beat production set up.
Said that, I’d love to have the following features:
The ability to have a global MIDI mapping that layers on top of whatever song-specific mapping. Why? Because at home I have a KORG controller and at my parents I have an AKAI MPK controller and when working I have to re-map (load another mapping file) to the song instead of just having a “plug & play” mapping like what reason has. I understand the logic of song specific mapping but I would like to have a GLOBAL MIDI OVERRIDE mapping.
The ability to MIDI-map absolutely everything (tabs, instrument selection, etc), that way I could forget about the computer, much like Maschine or Ableton push.
In my opinion Renoise is not far away from a no-screen work flow if this two features exist.
Maybe there are ways to do this and I don know about them, then I would be glad how to achieve them.
Many options exist for this type of workflow. I wonder how much you have researched?
GLOBAL MIDI OVERRIDE
Here, the first thing that springs to mind are song templates. They can ‘remember’ your MIDI mappings, so everything is ready when you load the song.
If a template song is not possible for some reason, you might have better luck saving/loading DSP chains (MIDI mappings are included here as well) or the complete set of MIDI mappings (can be exported/imported from the MIDI-mapping dialog).
Secondly, we have tools such as Duplex. With support for a wide variety of controllers (everything from old mixing consoles to android phones), it could potentially mean “plug-and-play” support for your particular device. Another tool promising a similar, but more ‘back to basics’ approach is xRules.
MIDI-map absolutely everything
If you press CMD/CTRL + M, you will see a pretty good deal of the Renoise UI light up, to indicate that it’s MIDI mappable.
However, that is only a small part of the actual MIDI mappings you have available. Open the MIDI Mapping dialog and scroll through the list to get an idea - there are_many_mappings to choose from.
And if you need to add a particular mapping, most of these mappings are actually specified in a lua script that you can modify. Feel free to ask.
Btw: my experience is that you can’t get a “no-screen workflow” going unless you settle for some specific way of doing things. You really have to consider what is essential and what isn’t, it is hardly practical to map everything to a controller.