Playing selected area in sample editor at any pitch

Ideas & suggestions
1

The only thing that is scheduled right now for Renoise is a bugfix update, cause we’re currently working on some other bigger non Renoise related project. We don’t have the capacity to run multiple projects at once - well, at least not with full new feature sets that are to be implemented. Once the other project is done, we have to see where we are and what we want and will make a new plan.

Regarding any minor updates, I was wondering if I could point you towards this:

https://forum.renoise.com/t/how-to-choose-pitch-for-playing-selected-area-in-sample-editor/45549

Yeah it’s a bit selfish to just demand the thing I want, but…

Well, no matter how hard I look, I haven’t found another software which would work for me (Renoise is still almost a 100% match with how I approach music production) so I will just keep using Renoise for now. And reading this topic I suddenly saw an image of me making music as an old man - and still fucking having to run two different versions of Renoise back and forth all the time. :smiley: If it wasn’t for that one missing button, I’d pretty much be set and could remove the older version altogether.

(I’m starting to hate modern things anyway and the direction devices and gadgets are currently headed, so I could then just nail the door shut, remove myself from civilization and make some kick ass old fart music in my dungeon for the rest of my days. :smiley: )

But yeah, selfish reguest… Sorry… Just a feature that I personally needed and still can’t get over the fact that it got lost along the way.

Anyway. In regard to the actual topic: I sincerely do hope development continues at some point, seeing as Renoise still has a workflow approach (and engine) which other software can’t touch, imo… But yeah, being in my thirties myself now, realizing the ‘cold facts of life’ and everything, I understand that it’s a tricky decision for you guys to choose just how much time you’ll want to spend in a project like this and if it’s something you can keep doing forever in the first place.

I wish you guys best of luck in all your future endeavors, whatever they may be.

2

Hi Saine, much love to your music!

I’ve shared a nice (and easy!) trick that makes something close to this possible - you’re not previewing the selection, but playing in any pitch from a slice marker:

https://forum.renoise.com/t/play-samples-from-any-position-in-any-pitch/46801

And certainly better than having to fiddle around with some option inside a menu, like in 2.x :slight_smile:

3

Hi Saine, much love to your music!

I’ve shared a nice (and easy!) trick that makes something close to this possible - you’re not previewing the selection, but playing in any pitch from a slice marker:

https://forum.renoise.com/t/play-samples-from-any-position-in-any-pitch/46801

And certainly better than having to fiddle around with some option inside a menu, like in 2.x :slight_smile:

Thanks very much!

Just tried it and this is a super useful trick (forum member kopias also pointed this out to me just now) - I’ll surely find use for it in the future and considering this from a sample-mangling side, this opens up a lot of new possibilities as well. Great!

Although to be frank, I’m not sure how much it helps with the ‘reference listening’ angle I had. :confused:

For example, I’m currently in the process of checking out the pre-masters of a 12-track release every now and then, together with some other music lined up next to it, using a couple of different sets of speakers/headphones and so. So with the old version of Renoise, I’ll just load a bunch of wavs up and all of the, say, 15-20 or so, samples are then immediately ready to be played at any pitch - I don’t, for example, have to do any preparation work on them or hold a key down to keep playing from that pitch (I can walk around the room if I want to etc.)

I can then just use the mouse wheel to scroll through them at an instant, zoom in and out, and mouseclick+enter play on them. When I’m done, no need to save any templates, just close the program down and if I wanna do it again, no prob, Renoise starts in no time, after all.

With the phrases method, I’d have to go through these additional steps (might not seem like such a bad thing at first, but it’s a different story when you’d have to do them like 15 times for every wav, each time, when the whole point of this is essentially the “hey I’ll just do a quick checkup on these mixes next to that other album I liked, before continuing with my mixing work in 5 minutes” workflow thing which Renoise excels at imo, having to click stuff as little as possible and having things as readily available as possible). Also, if I understood correctly, with the phrases method the only way to hold a note (not having to hold a key down) from any other pitch than the default one would be to go to the phrases menu and choose a different note, then come back to waveform menu and press the play button in the lower right corner. Just using the keyboard would stop playing every time when the key is released, so, playing a five minute track for instance…

Not to sound ungrateful! Sorry haha, this was a great tip nevertheless.

Anyway. I don’t know if I managed to explain the whole ‘reference listening workflow’ thing too well, it’s hard to put in words and I don’t even know if anyone else out there does it, but it’s really something I’m so used to I can’t live without at this point and I haven’t seen in any other program. I use iZotope RX and Sound Forge quite often, for miscellaneous sample editing duties and random checkups, but they don’t offer anything close to this. Just messy, overlapping windows and dragging them out of each others way all the time.

It just kinda makes me tear my hair out to think that it was such a simple thing and it’s all gone because of a missing button and now I’m stuck with the old Renoise version forever, aaaaaargh. :smiley:

4

So with the old version of Renoise, I’ll just load a bunch of wavs up and all of the, say, 15-20 or so, samples are then immediately ready to be played at any pitch - I don’t, for example, have to do any preparation work on them or hold a key down to keep playing from that pitch (I can walk around the room if I want to etc.)

I can then just use the mouse wheel to scroll through them at an instant, zoom in and out, and mouseclick+enter play on them.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Rns2.8 ever had a “handy” way to play any selection in any note?

As I recall it, using the keyboard would always play from the beginning of the sample. So you needed to select the pitch from that little popup menu in the sample editor (the popup that has now been removed) and trigger sample playback (preview) from within the sample editor as well.

Not arguing that the requirement of “preparing” a sample isn’t potentially annoying. Perhaps an opportunity for me to do an automated/scripted “assistant” - I came up with this trick after all :wink:

When you’re referring to (not) holding a key, walking around the room… you mean that the sample preview acts as a one-shot?

Well this is also possible in 3.1 by triggering the sample as a “sustained voice” - using a sustain pedal or by sending a high value on CC#64. A bit different approach, but the result is the same.

5

Correct me if I’m wrong, but

Insert drumroll here… :smiley:

you needed to select the pitch from that little popup menu in the sample editor

…no, that does sound a bit painstaking indeed - but there are (were) those small arrows and the selected note would always remain. After that I’d just mouse click somewhere on the track + hit enter (play) from that position. Not just from the beginning of the sample, but anywhere I want.

Soo… Bare with me on this - I have the samples/tracks in front of me, see, and I scroll up and down through them using the mousewheel and left-click at selected points on the waveform and press enter to play. It will always remember where I had clicked in Any given track, meaning that if I have several revisions of a track (say, a hotter master and a quieter master) I can choose a point on the waveform, which, for example, easily distorts on the hotter master, and flick between them using the mousewheel, hitting enter to play. So I’m getting a perfect before-after comparison and I can do the checkups instantly with no delays (really helps whenever wanting to make sure that a change in tone is not just imaginary). No dropdown menus and everything happens in one window (no need to go to the phrases window or anything in between).

So ok, sure, this can all be done with the current version as well, but… Here’s the thing. To make things even more beautiful… Let’s say I have a very nasty, boomy frequency in my room at 130hz (ah fuck it, I actually do) and I want to make sure, whether the bass in track A2 is actually too loud in comparison to track B1 or if it’s just my room emphasizing that frequency - I just click another note (other than C4) from under the sample editor to see if I’m getting the same boomy impression at another pitch - and whatever pitch I just chose, remains intact with both tracks! So I don’t have to click it for both tracks, I just do the selection once and always have the “sample editor master pitch” right underneath the sample editor waveform view, set to whatever I want it and if I have 20 tracks on there, I can go through them at a different pitch should I need to, by just scrolling the mousewheel and hitting enter - afterwards I can return to the normal pitch and it stays there. No dropdown menus. It’s gorgeous.

Same thing if I was using a sample recorded from a ground looping turntable and am unsure whether I set a low pass filter on a drum break steep enough (=if there’s any high whining sounds up there that I can’t hear, but an 8 year old on the other hand, would hear) - I simply set the pitch a little lower and go through all the tracks - ah, track A4 does have a bit of nastiness up there, I’ll just eq that out. Faaaantastic. These are just two examples… I guess it’s apparent at this point, that I love pitching stuff up and down. :smiley: I listen to ‘commercial’ recordings like that in Renoise a lot as well, just to gain some perspective or if I really want to find out how a beat is put together and analyze it, etc.

So at the same time I can keep some frequency analyzers and stuff close by, and it’s basically just the fastest way ever to cross-reference masters and different revisions of tracks - and as a bonus, everything I wrote above is super helpful when sampling old records as well: sometimes I’d have a tedious amount of hours of some random cassettes I’ve ripped or something, with 95% crap on them, but I still want to go through all of it because I don’t want to miss a possible hidden gem. So I can just have all the recordings lined up and then click around, sometimes if a 5 minute stretch seems very likely to be crap but I still want to check it, I can set the pitch higher for a while, or if I just want to immediately try “hmmm how would this field recording in the middle of this 8 minute sample sound when pitched really really low? Here lemme try…”

Ok I’m getting carried away but you get the idea, the point was never that a pitch of the sample can’t be changed - there are always workarounds - but instead, just how intuitive and lightning fast it is (was) in terms of workflow. No need to go to any phrases menu or flick back and forth between views. Again, I haven’t come across that in any other daw. And that’s why I have to keep the old version installed.

When you’re referring to (not) holding a key, walking around the room… you mean that the sample preview acts as a one-shot?

Yeah, when pressing enter it keeps it playing forever, so if I want to preview listen a full track in between some more microscopic checks, it always keeps it playing. This is how it behaves currently as well (when pressing play / enter) but it’s just the pitching functionality is missing from 3.1. which unfortunately makes the aforementioned trickery impossible.

Sorry for the long rant, haha…

6

I’d still would like to see the following logic, before the need to fiddle with phrases and markers per sample:
1. nothing selected OR whole sample selected? play the whole sample in any pitch by entering notes on either keyboard or midi keyboard.
2. selected something? play that piece only from the beginning and end of that selection, again in any pitch with any input.
3. There is no 3, it would be awesome if option 2 saw light someday. But oh man, that seems hard to develop

!!! THE FEATURE IS IMPLEMENTED TODAY !!!

7

While considering possible future fine tuning to this functionality - it would be great if there was any way to at least bring back what was already there. For me, personally, it worked like a charm. Without even ‘selecting’ anything as such - just clicking and enter would always play any sample at whatever pitch is selected. Reference listen/prehear galore.

Dunno if an unofficial extension is a possibility…

8

While considering possible future fine tuning to this functionality - it would be great if there was any way to at least bring back what was already there. For me, personally, it worked like a charm. Without even ‘selecting’ anything as such - just clicking and enter would always play any sample at whatever pitch is selected. Reference listen/prehear galore.

Dunno if an unofficial extension is a possibility…

If I get my hands dirty on LUA scripting maybe… but for now its manual labor. Oh well :slight_smile: