Well, right now the tool has an odd trade-off depending if you use a midi controller or the keyboard. If you use the keyboard you can’t hear yourself playing because the UI is frozen while it clicks, while if you use a controller, you can hear yourself fine during the countdown, but the first note you play wont be recorded if it’s slightly too early.
This will be fixed once we have a proper Rest/Wait/Sleep function in the API.
As for soloing the current track, all you have to do is solo the track before you begin the countdown, this will keep the track in solo mode. If you want to mute individual tracks you need to mute them on the arranger and not on the pattern view.
Nimitz, you hadn’t responded to my post about the punch-in/overdub. I didn’t mean to hijack the thread away from what the tool is meant to do, I just figured since you solved one of the 2 major problems for live recording, why not mention the other one. =)
Out of curiosity (since you’ve been scripting around), do you think it is even possible with scripting to accomplish punch-in / overdub as described? I wonder if it’s even possible through scripting.
hektic : So I just watched the video you posted and from what I just saw such a feature makes sense in logic or other similar daws where your recording actually becomes a “block” of sorts.
In renoise (or trackers) we works with patterns so theres no need to start and stop the recording halfway in the pattern since it’s always the same size.
Unless what you want is to be able to have a countdown then move to a specific position in a pattern (instead of always starting on line 1) this could be done rather easily. The user could choose where in the pattern he wants the playing+recording to start after the countdown.
punch-in/overdub would definitely make sense in a tracker environment, I’d love to have it. Would be great if there could be an ‘automatic pattern growth’ option as well, where recording notes into a pattern automatically adds a new pattern after the default length finishes -> so you can play and record notes without having to set-up a number of patterns beforehand.
Hi Nimitz, thanks for taking the time to watch the video.
The reason why this is so badly needed in a tracker is becuase you need the ability to edit your takes. Let me clarify exactly when it would be used:
I have a complicated piano hook (complicated for me becuase I’m not a great keyboardist) that I play into the tracker in real time. I can’t play it perfectly, and after recording the pattern most of it came out right but I messed up in the middle. I need renoise to allow me to loop this hook (pattern) repeatedly while I play in the hook over and over until I get it right. However, I don’t want to overwrite the part that I had done correctly. Setting the markers allows you specify which sections of your patern recording are destructable (will be overwritten), and which parts won’t be overwritten. The way that Renoise currently works it will loop and just add more and more notes to the entire pattern. It doesn’t overdub, and it doesn’t support punch in or punch our markers. For this reason I have to stop the pattern and clear it over and over again. Jonas idea about adding in new patterns automatically is very good - BUT - if I have something that I can’t ever play cleanly in, then I need to use punch in and punch out markers to make edits to specific parts of the pattern. Does that make sense to you?
For my particular uses, punch-in and overdub will allow me to record a take, identify which parts are incorrect and play it back continuously and fix (only) the parts that need fixing until I get it right. I hope that makes sense to the people who read this. The reason why this isn’t a hugely desired feature is many folks who use Renoise like to program notes as opposed to play them. I like programming notes too, but sometimes you want something legitimately played in, and if you don’t have the chops to do it on your own, punch in and punch out helps you cheat to acheive it!
hektic : What i could do is make an option that allows to start the preclick at a given line in the pattern and maybe clear from this point to the end of the pattern. The problem is that the way the API is right now it’s not possible to make the script take actions while you are playing. Basically the script has to do everything in one block of time.
crytek :
Do you mean something like clearing the FX track only? that could be done rather easily. As for clearing stuff like the pan/vol/delay columns i don’t really see how this is useful since if you want to automate or control these values youre gonna use an hydra device which will be controlled from the FX column.
As for skipping to the next pattern, this is only while the countdown is running, not while you are recording. I can’t think of any reason why someone would want the pattern to change while the countdown is running (and your patterns would need to be really short).
I was playing around with Preclick today, trying to use it with AutoClone.
Basically, I needed to count-in to record with a backing track. The quoted “mute” feature made it unusable.
Is there a reason why muting all tracks except the current one is mandatory?
Can this be an option?
Addendum: On second thought, this maybe a bug?
If I run Preclick twice in a row, “muting” is inverted. The code that does this is:
if (renoise.song().tracks[renoise.song().selected_track_index].solo_state == false) then
renoise.song().tracks[renoise.song().selected_track_index]:solo()
solo = 1
end
