Well the mouseklicking I mean is the one that you gotta do many times, equivalent to mute or solo buttons.
The tool itself works just fine as far as seeing when the volume slider on my m-audio is pulled down to -inf. That’s not the problem either. Works flawlessly.
It’s just that for whatever reason, Renoise, the main editor, refuses to give control to the tool and so the midi notes and everything on that track is still being recorded when the tool is reporting the instrument and track as “silent”.
As soon as I hit “edit” (wich I have mapped to a button on the M-Audio) - The tool does what it’s supposed to do with the “auto” thing, it registers what’s going on.
The darn main program however, seems to ignore this and keeps recording everything and sending notes to the VST, even tho they are not in rality producing any sound because their volumes are zero.
The kicker with that is that when I got some of the more demanding VST’s - even my 8 core CPU occasionally gets overloaded and cause a crackling static noise.
This is easier to avoid if the silent VST don’t recieve any MIDI signals at all, as in doesn’t trigger all the stuff a softsynth like VST does.
It also creates a problem when certain filters are recorded on silent tracks, such as modulation, pitch, sustain and other similar things.
What I mean by that is in a scenario like this:
Solo instrument is active, I use a lot of modulation and other faders to make it sound more “alive” with variation. A controller usually has only one modulation wheel and so more then one VST are reacting to it.
But the silent ones are not supposed to be affected but are in fact recording all those things as well. So when I switch to another VST and I have not manually put back the modwheel, that instrument can sound very weird or different. Orchestra strings are a good example of those types of VST for the modwheel very often controls tremolo and/or attack “breath control” on those.
When a DAW has arm-record properly working, the vst’s set to not be recorded does not recieve midi control commands at all. Just like real life instruments do nothing when it’s not their turn to sound.
Working with MIDI like this is so much more fun to me then samples and doing one track at the time in a very timeconsuming and “programming” style.
I much prefer to play as much of it as I can simultaneously and use the MIDI controller the way it’s meant to be used.
Hmm… Not sure that made things any clearer. LOL - But it’s how I prefer to make music. So much of what I do is made up on the fly, while playing just for the sake of playing.
The old school way of doing one instrument at the time takes immense time that real life does not quite have room for. My workflow is much easier (and more fun) if I can just hit the start recording and then do everything directly from the M-Audio. Especially considering that I almost always record with OBS Studio and visualizer and stuff hapening all at once.
Indeed, the volume and all that does work. It’s just that ReNoise for whatever reason, record everything wether you want to or not, on all VST, as soon as there is MIDI Routing going on.
Presonus Studio One2 has the record arm per instrument and it does make it so that the VST that is not armed, doesn’t do a darn thing. it’s completely passive, the way it’s supposed to be.
But the idiots that made that program and other DAW’s - Forgot to put in a way to map that arm-record button for each track/instrument to anything at all - We have to klick the tiny little things on the screen with the mouse cursor, and I just can’t do that while recording live like this. Not even Apples superfamous program ProTools has that specific thing mappable - At least not in the version I tried. I don’t know about the newer versions since they run only on MacOS nowadays.
Aside from that one little detail, ReNoise is exactly the kind of DAW I been looking for ever sine I worked with Amiga back in the early 90’s and a program called “OctaMED Soundstudio”.
It’s much much easier for me to read the tracker when I need to, for there are times where I do record one or more instrument tracks separately. Then I don’t remember the chords I used unless I can see them coming on the screen, and that’s where the Tracker GUI of ReNoise shines. Pieanoroll editors are much harder to read out since again, some idiot decided to put them verticaly on the screen.
There is no such thing as a vertical pianoroll that I know of. I’m playing the Piano, not an accordion. LOL -
Also, not all DAW even has the note name (i.e C#3) clearly visible on their pianorolls. it’s just a bunch of lines and dots on a striped background texture that is almost painful to look at while playing.
ReNoise also seems to run smoother on my system then most other DAWs except possibly for Reaper or what it’s name is.
ReNoise also seems to be able to run a mix of 32 and 64 bit VST’s without the aid of third party program Jbridge. (Presonus crashes every so often).
and finally… Renoise has a much nicer pricetag on it then the hundreds of Euro others cost.
If we only had the individual Arm-Record MIDI mappable it would be the purrfect DAW.