Pattern Effects On The Master/send Tracks.

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. :P

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?

haha… damn, I kinda ramble when I’m trying to explain an idea in my head :) … hope people were able to understand some of what I meant here in my post.

I fully understand your idea and agree with it. This function is something i had in mind aswel.

I think the new 1.5 rendering options make these effects easier to accomplish, but even then, these buffering options can kick ass for the lord.

I’m not sure though if this can be implemented, I imagine this can be very hard when rendering.

It’s food for thought though

actually this is something I’ve always thought of, but I’ve never reported it (if I remember well), because this would lead to the same problems of using normal tracking commands with VST instruments: you will be able to modify only the present content of audio buffer at a time, and this will probably give poor results in terms of audio quality.

For example, if you add a portamento up command to the master, how should the tracker behave?

A second of buffer will then be played in less than one second… :huh:

should the pattern go faster, or should ReNoise retrigger the audio buffer until one second will be reached?

the idea is indeed interesting, but I think it would be impossible to implement in an usable way.

What to say… just render your song and use the resulting WAV as a sample

Exactamundo!!

edit By It-Alien:
edited the quoting to my own phrase because I’ve accidentally truncated it in my message

There would definitely be some strange issues with how it works. Some things could be adjusted to work a little better by experimenting with different buffer sizes and such, but overall I think the weird side-effects would be the stuff we’d end up using most, hehe.

For me, the slightly unpredictable nature of it would be the most interesting part :) But since you asked, I would imagine that once the buffer has been “used up”, audio playback would return to normal. I don’t think it could really work any other way. Obviously it wouldn’t work perfectly in every situation - portamento up being one of the main problems - but I still think it could work quite well for other things.

Rendering to WAV does of course allow you all the freedom you want to play with the sound in weird ways, so you are correct and I understand what you’re saying there, but at the same time a lot of really cool stuff comes from impulsive experimentation in the tracker. How many times have we all just decided to put down some random commands/values, just to see what happened?

Making a WAV is still a simple task, certainly a lot easier in 1.5 with the render-to-slot feature, but in those moments when your ideas are flowing very quickly, the extra step can be just enough to get in the way of some inspiration. Especially if you’re changing the song quite a lot, changing instruments, filters, etc., which would force you to re-render the WAV sample each time to keep it updated. (at least for me… maybe I’m just lazy, heh)

Anyway… just silly ideas :) … perhaps some of this will inspire new features in a future version… perhaps not. Renoise still rocks either way.

Some years ago I’ve made an XM og about 7 minutes where the first 3 minutes were made using a sample made with the next 6 seconds of the song rendered to WAV :D