Plugin Grabber Best Practices

So lately I’ve been wanting to develop synth patches natively using resampled raw oscillators from VSTs. When I use single-cycles, I always lose some harmonic qualities of the original synth and I’m wondering about a few things:

At the DSP level, how is looping a single cycle different from playing an unfiltered oscillator of a VSTi? Is it Renoise’s sound engine that causes the difference?

When using the plugin grabber, do you all have tips for getting the best quality? Long samples or cross-fade loops? I dislike the amplitude modulation (audible beating) that occurs with cross-fade loops, but single-cycle looping always has a noticeable difference in harmonic information of the signal. Trade-offs abound.

Feel free to get as technical as you’d like with explanations, I can handle it. Thanks in advance friends.

bro i guess it all depends in the sound youre going to create …ive had cool results

using all the methods you describe above

  • single cycle waveforms (for creating pad, synths and bass sounds)

  • rendered SCW from various vst’s in reaktor and serum…i guess after some processing (fitlering reverb delay) the beating you listen it kinda fades out or at least becomes lest prominent sounding in the final instrument :slight_smile:

so for me yeah …a rendered saw or any SCW of any vst would offer better results than just one waveform repitched across the entire keyboard

but again it all depends in your instrument

take a look at this instrument

complex space design

http://forum.renoise.com/index.php/files/file/563-complex-ambience-sounds-type-a/

I like to make sure to set it so the rendered synth notes are always at least length of the pattern sizes used in the section.
I don’t don’t know if that’s necessary or not, I just seemed to have gotten into that habit when I use it.

Do not use the renoise crossfade funcs. Both the one in the sample editor as well as the one in the plugin grabber produce suboptimal results. At least I never use them.

Actually I’ve just started to try to make my own crossfade tool because the renoise function sucks so much. First results are promising, but it will still need some features and a gui. It works by…letting you place a loop first, and select a range around one of the markers (where the fade will be applied), then it will smoothen your already existant loops in a really clean way & will leave the loop markers where you set them. First results sound very promising. If you have you loop markers places properly for an in-phase loop, results will be totally superior to the renoise builtin method. There will still be slight beating like with the renoise method, but much weaker if you set up the loop points right.

Sometimes you need the loops. But when plugin grabbing, you get best results by just sampling notes long enough instead of looping. Looping will always degrade and remove organic variations. Looping is more interesting to transform sounds into material for instruments with independent, new charakter.

Thats why we need a #native ‘synthesize loop’ - feature:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w8ay2sF8_o

Actually I’ve just started to try to make my own crossfade tool because the renoise function sucks so much.

Wait - you want to check out this “hidden gem” first: xfade-pow by afta8

https://forum.renoise.com/t/new-tool-3-0-xfade-pow/41920