Please add basics to Renoise's midi recording

Ideas & suggestions
1

Good morning,

I would like to suggest to you to add the (currently missing) basics to midi recording:

a) Renoise lacks of “erase on/off” / “overwrite/overdub” modes. I’ve seen a bunch of scripts which try to compensate this lack of features, but all those scripts never do the job accurately like a native implementation. This might be due the fact that playback events in lua always fire sloppy, so you will always need some pi*daumen lookahead.

Concept
I think there should be an “erase on/off” button next to metronome button or so, also shortcuts. In “erase on” mode, Renoise simply deletes all notes which are in the way, in the same row of the track used while recording. It acts like there was no notes in the track yet. After stopping, it also will fix maybe obsolete note-offs. In “erase off” mode, it should respect all existing notes, even after pattern repeat.

b) Renoise is not very intelligent when it comes to recording into a loop. Once the loop range passed, it usually messes up the note data on the beginning of the pattern. Humans are not machines, so it will be very likely that you leave the note a bit too late for example.

c) If you record something, you fail and undo it and then record again, Renoise now might have placed the cursor to a more right column, without obvious reason. Or Renoise thinks that there is note data on the left, but there isn’t any. I don’t remember the exact scenario, but this happens pretty often.

d) Lack of minimal comfort stuff: A metronome volume would help a lot, if you have a pretty quiet base mix, the metronome simply will destroy your ears (I also think a shorter more percussive “tick” sound would also improve the experience). Also it would be nice to a have a mode “pre-count, but later disabled”. So the metronome precounts, and then stops! The current precount switch could have three states instead only 2. Precount also could get an extra icon. Or precount was not an extra property anymore, but metronome on/off would get more states instead. Such thing also is pretty difficult to implement using lua.

I don’t think this would be lot of effort, but heavily improve the midi recording experience.

Thanks for consideration!

8 Likes
2

One feature I would love would be MIDI overwrite, as described, where you can punch in/out as one might do with audio tape (or as one can do I think in reaper with wav recording).

This would be quite slick for live performances, where you can start a loop, add notes, punch out and let that loop cycle, but then punch in new notes to replace sections of the loop.

4 Likes
3

I think this happens because “Renoise does not correctly detect when a note is released” in some specific case. Maybe because MIDI input doesn’t actually send when the note is released. It is as if are waiting to record the note-OFF. Since he has not yet recorded the note-OFF, he “understands” that this note sub-column is occupied (playing).

This issue is common when creating related tools, for example when using the OSC for note_on and note_off.
Renoise (or a tool) must know at all times what note triggers, what instrument triggers and what track and save this data in a buffer and then use it so for not fail in the moment of release a note.

The release of the note is likely failing for some reason (like changing the octave on the MIDI keyboard or something like that)…

1 Like
4

Well thought out suggestions, that would all aid to make recording midi events a more intuitive and less cumbersome experience.

2 Likes
5

I also think a replace record mode vs standard overdub would be nice

6

There was an approach for overwrite/eraze in the latest 3.4 beta, but then it was removed again due conceptional questions/problems. Maybe we could discuss this here…

7

Shift + F3 even while recording is what I currently do. But yes totally agree. The right Shift key method is fine to use but I don’t like how it continues to the next pattern without the option to loop around the pattern.

8

If you’ve clicked loop for a pattern(s), it will overwrite anything you’ve recorded ( note/vol/delay ) until stopped or edit mode off. I could see this would be tricky with midi controllers with the way they input their velocity data on the panning or however it works?