I think it’s a great idea. Trackers have always been about collab/sharing stuff. But forget about the clipboard copy/paste stuff, nobody will bother doing that, you’ll loose the overview etc.
Instead, it could be made to work as a service, completely transparent and in realtime. This would simply take it to the next level. But anyone with the wish to start developing something like this should probably wait for the Renoise scripting API to become available. Scripted network access has already been tested as a proof of concept, and the rest is a matter of updating song data, for which there’s full access.
However, this is only the client part. From a technical viewpoint, it would probably be a good idea to have a central server on the internet (a “tracker” that will monitor all the clients. This would reduce the traffic needed to have everybody synced to each other, and help to identify and resolve conflicts between versions.
I’m thinking about the challenges that every other piece of realtime collaboration software has to address, stuff like resolving conflicting user edits, ability to rollback to a previous version if someone deletes the whole project etc.
Under Linux with netjack, you can synchronize two Renoise session across network. Of course it just transmits audio and midi (a2jmidi?).
I’ve managed to use it with a friend with Seq24 and Puredata and it works pretty well.
Sorry, it’s not you in particular. There’s just a lot of hype behind scripting and OSC without much personal research on what that means.
OSC is like MIDI over HTTP. Scripting is like programming. Combine both and you can do whatever you want. But, that doesn’t mean it’s simple. It’s programming for the user. The onus is on the user here.
Actually now that i’ve checked renoise 2.1, it seems like XRNI and DSP chains are also copied to clipboard which makes the whole network support program a lot easier to code.
A few features popped into my mind:
Exchange and merge .XRNS together (merge with existing 3rd party software) or do it with this program
XML packets sent are zipped
Exchange used VST and VSTi and save them into desired folder
The program would show channel numbers so you paste the data in correct places.
I have no licence for 2.5, so i don’t know about pattern matrix…
Of course a realtime network support implemented straight into renoise would be more handy. Above mentioned features plus:
you could lock what you are doing, so no one could change your track.
See other composers’ cursors and mouse pointers in different colour
see what changes the other people are doing and
you could merge the changes together and both would have the same XRNS all the time.
This thread is giving me some ideas and a question pops up…
I’d like to connect two PC computers running WinXP and send the xml clipboards back and forth between them. What would be the best solution for that purpose? None of the computers are connected to the Internet, so I can’t use MSN/ICQ or similar chat softwares to send the clipboard text data.
This is exactly how the program would be like, but it would state which instrument number is copied on clipboard, which track is on clipboard etc. Also it would send clipboard data to clients zipped. The program would be made deliberately for Renoise so it’s possible to invent specific features.
Useful sounding tools linked on vvvv’s website, I haven’t tried either yet though.
Input Director:
Input Director is a Windows application that lets you control multiple Windows systems using the keyboard/mouse attached to one computer. […] Input Director also supports a “shared” clipboard, in which you can copy data onto the clipboard on one system, transition across to another and paste.
Beyond Copy:
BeyondCopy is a LAN hosts clipboard synchronism tool. BeyondCopy allows you to copy something in one computer, and paste it in another computer directly.
I’ve never used those but
They seem to be very similar to Synergy:
It was a little tricky to setup at first a couple years ago, but once it is, it works rather flawlessly across all of the supported Os’s: OSX,Linux,Windows.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Impulse Tracker in this thread.
I was just thinking about how it’d be nice to be able to work on a remix w/ my band mate simultaneously by networking Renoise.
This was fairly easily done w/ Impulse Tracker, it might of actually simply been a built in feature that you enabled.
I figured, well maybe it’s already in Renoise and w/ a quick search came across this forum post.
Maybe the programmers that want to make this happen should look into the method used in Impulse Tracker.
I came upon Renoise after years of using Impulse, it was kinda like the IT3 that never was and the answer everyone was waiting for in order to take tracking to the next level. With these Renoise having these roots in the ol DOS program, shouldn’t one be able to recreate the same networking ability if it’s already been done before?
I can’t recall what was actually usable about the network driver from Impulse Tracker, since it was IPX which is only useful in LAN environments.
Nevertheless, it was a great effort when i got it with 2.15, but i was more than happy with the wav exporter back then (and the filter envelopes).
that will monitor all the clients. This would reduce the traffic needed to have everybody synced to each other, and help to identify and resolve conflicts between versions.
