I’ve just started using Renoise and have a question about sending MIDI to a Renoise slave. For those of you familiar with Numerology you know that you can send MIDI to change the patterns in a stack.
I tried to initially do this by setting up Renoise to send MIDI C2 messages using this tutorial:
Now this worked fine except that when I went to render the project none of the program changes were made. So, playing live was OK, but Numerology didn’t do the changes during rendering.
Kieran (who’s been super helpful) suggested I try and use MIDI-Control-Device instead. So this is what I’ve done:
I select the track where Numerology is ReWired into and I select a new instrument slot.
Under Instrument Settings I select MIDI Properties and select the Device. Now there’s a bunch of choices here and I’ve tried every combination I could think of. If I select the IAC driver (and on Numerology the IAC MIDI input), I can manually change the pattern and using the C2 MIDI command I can also change the pattern whilst playing live as I mentioned above.
I then add a MIDI-Control-Device to the Numerology track and select the instrument slot I setup in #1.
I then select Prg Change and I can again toggle it manually but this time using the MIDI-Control-Device.
Finally, I go to automation and select program change, and create a change envelope for each pattern.
Then when I go to play the Renoise patterns I can see the MIDI-Control-Device Prg Change changing but the pattern in Numerology doesn’t change! If I stop the song, I can manually change it by toggling the arrows in the MIDI-Control-Device!
Just an update: I thought it might have been an issue with Numerology so I tried the same sort of workflow with Ableton Live. Here I mapped CC’s to a couple of clips and automated the changes. In both 2.5.1 and 2.6b3 I could play live no problem, but neither would render the changes correctly. I tried both realtime and normal rendering … no go.
So either I’m doing something wrong (likely) or Renoise as a ReWire master has a bug.
when sending MIDI to rewire slaves in Renoise, make sure that you are using the MIDI devices that start with "ReWire: " in Renoise. All other devices are virtual or real MIDI device ports which Renoise disables while rendering. The "ReWire: " devices are running directly through ReWire and thus also offer much better timing.
With Nuerology this unfortunately is a bit confusing, cause it register ReWire and standard, default MIDI devices. So its quite easy to mix that up.
Let us know if this works, and if you need more help please…
I am having no luck in getting Renoise to control patch changes in Numerology via MIDI. fwiw, it is working in ableton. Perhaps I’m missing some rudimentary renoise setting.
It would be great if someone could write a quick walkthrough as to how they got it working…
Got an update on this, thanks to a tip provided by another user.
It seems to be a basenote/octave mismatch between Renoise and the other applications.
The MIDI spec has 128 possible note values numbered from 0 to 127, but there does not seem to be a completely official word on what those values should actually represent, and unfortunately every application tends to map the values to a different set of note ranges. Some say MIDI note value 0 should be a C 0, others say it should be a C 1, or a C -1 (C minus one), etc.
Renoise by default interprets value 0 as a C 0 (C in octave zero)
MIDI-OX seems to interpret value 0 as a C -1 (C minus one)
Ableton Live seems to interpret value as a C -2 (C minus two)
etc.
To work around this mismatch when using Rewired instruments in Renoise, go to the Instrument Settings tab in Renoise and try changing the basenote from C-4 to different values such as C-3, C-2, C-1, etc. This should hopefully resolve the issue.
yep, managed to work this out with the help of tech support from both companies.
btw, if you’re on OSX, it’s helpful to use Snoise Midi Monitor.app (free) to check the midi output of an app.