Standard Disclaimer: Apologies if this has already been asked/posted, I did some searches for other topics but couldn’t find any that seemed to match, etc, etc, etc.
Anyway…
This is probably something that’s been talked about in the past and was just dismissed for being too difficult to code, or just crazy, I dunno, but I was wondering about the possibility of enabling a few “standard” pattern effects on the master and send channels.
For example: pitch slide, retrigger, reverse, etc.
Of course, these effects are only designed to work on an individual instrument/sample so the methods used to create the effects and buffer the sound are probably completely different to how the master/send tracks work. Some kind of extra, configurable buffering options would probably have to be added in to make it work.
Perhaps a “read ahead buffer” could be added to the master track (where DC Filter, DeClipper and Dither are currently placed). You could set how big the buffer is in ticks/steps (or milliseconds, or whatever), and this value would affect how far ahead into the song Renoise looks/renders before actually playing the output. So obviously whatever the value is set to is the maximum length of any effect you might use on the master track.
This could theoretically allow some pretty cool (and weird) effects. Reversing the whole mix for a few steps, retriggering the whole mix, doing pitch slides, maybe even using 09xx?! etc, etc.
Perhaps each track could have its own independant buffer size, which is in turn limited by whatever the master track buffer size is set to. So if the master buffer is 8 steps long, track N’s buffer can be anything from 0 - 8 steps.
Of course, such a buffering system would cause a delay when you press play, since Renoise would have to buffer things for a moment before actually starting, but I personally wouldn’t mind such a “side effect” if it allowed me to use these crazy effects, and of course it wouldn’t be a problem at all when rendering the song to WAV.
Hmm… whaddya think?