Playback of old rns / xrns sounds awful on new Renoise?

Help, Support & Bugs
1

Hi guys,

I don’t know if this thread belongs here or in the general discussion section, however since I updated to the latest build I noticed that all my old rns and xrns files (yes when I say rns I mean the file format from 6 years ago that pre-dates xrns :P) now have a very odd sound when played back.

They basically sound like they are being played in 8 bit, all the definition to the high end has gone and (all) the tracks from that era suddenly sound like they are being played on Protracker on amiga with 8bit mono 11khz samples. This is weird because on previous builds of Renoise these older tracks sounded fine.

To further illustrate this issue, here is an example. This track uses only native DSP’s and a couple of Blockfish compressors (the exact same instance of that plugin then and now).

Here is a link to my original render of the track in 2004 :

And here is what it sounds like when I play it back now :

There are no missing plugin instances, I updated the playback engine to the current standard but it made no difference. It’s surprising to see that its not just the dynamic of the beat that has gone (maybe the compressor DSP’s have been tweaked over the years and it sounds complete flat now, fair enough), but the overall sound is LO-FI, the hats have gone, like if it was played at a lower bit rate or frequency.

This is a big headache for me as I have to work on reviving these tracks for a project and I cannot use any of them as such :confused:

This applies to pretty much every file I have that is older than 6 years (and trust me I have many :P)

Does anyone know why this is happening and what could be done?

Cheers,

Neil

2

I would suggest not just basing it on an old render, but actually getting hold of an old copy of Renoise.

Because, then you could be certain what settings are working, and compare those against the recent version.

http://renoise.com/archived-releases

There is also some good advice being offered in this related thread:

https://forum.renoise.com/t/was-working-on-a-track-in-2-5-now-playback-in-3-0-1-causes-issues/43579

Btw: the song sounds really good (the old one, that is) :walkman:

3

here is an example

Could you share the original RNS file with us for further inspection?

Post a link here, or PM me, or email it to support at renoise dot com.

4

Thanks for the advice guys, I downloaded 1.52 (for which I made the splash screen, I had completely forgotten that! :D) and YES, it plays perfectly.

Does this mean there is some big retro compatibility problem with Renoise 3.0.1? I have observed this lofi playback issue with many (perhaps all) my RNS tracks :confused:

5

Ok, I’ve checked out the RNS file in question. Seems to have been created with Renoise 1.28? Pretty ancient history by now — still runs fine on Windows 8, though! :slight_smile:

When importing this old RNS file into Renoise 3.01, I definitely noticed an overall difference in the sound, and thankfully I quickly found the culprit: All of the sample-based instruments have an LP Moog filter applied with the default cutoff and resonance modulations, which is giving everything that weird and slightly resonant lofi sound. It seems that our backwards compatibility handlers got a little bit wonky when dealing with such old files in Renoise 3, so we’ll have to take a look at that some time.

To quickly solve the problem, load your 1.28 RNS into Renoise 2.8 (or pretty much any older version that came before 3.0) where it should still import/play correctly, save an XRNS from there, and then finally load that XRNS into Renoise 3.01 where it should be correctly upgraded.

To manually fix the problem and avoid the intermediate Renoise version, you can upgrade all the instrument modulations (via the instrument list context menu), and then manually switch all the filters from LP Moog to None.