Apologies in advance if it’s been discussed plenty before, but I couldn’t find any definitive answers to my questions upon looking around.
I’m currently writing a conversion tool for a sequence format similar to standard MIDI and an accompanying proprietary instrument-format. My goal is to convert the original songs to XRNS files. However, I’ve stumbled upon a couple of hurdles in the process. Namely, the original format, from early 2000s, appears to be more flexible in a couple regards related to pitch bending:
- An instrument can have more than one active pitch via pitch-bend (track-specific)
- The maximum pitch (bend) range is -/+127.0 semitones
Whereas, in Renoise, it appears that pitch bends (at least “M1” pitch-bends) are applied to all tracks that use the same instrument. And the maximum pitch bend range is 96.0 semitones.
Is there any good approach to get around these limitations in Renoise? I have thought of a couple of ideas so far, but find them somewhat cumbersome and perhaps not optimal:
Possible solution for issue #1: Make a separate copy of each instrument for each track. Drawbacks with this is that it adds to the XRNS filesize, adds clutter, and complicates the conversion process (instrument numbers/indexes would have to be changed in a lot of places, as well as respective modulation sets, etc.).
Possible solution for issue #2: Since it appears that there is never actually any pitch-bend command in the original files that goes above 96.0 semitones, this can probably be solved with a range conversion formula. Two songs do use a pitch-bend range of 127.0 though, so a potential drawback here is that it might not be a fully lossless conversion in these cases.