Hi there, I’m a newRenoise user, having made the jump from Modplug Tracker. I’m finding it to be a much more convenient system and really enjoying it so far.
I’m having some problems when it comes to using VSTis however. I keep getting an annoying ‘clicking’ sound at the start of each note which I can’t seem to get rid of. Is this likely to be a problem with the VSTis I’m using or something wrong with my Renoise.exe? As the instruments play ‘cleanly’ for me in Modplug.
The VSTis I’m using are:
Triangle II
iblit
phybes
My PC is about 4 years old and exceeds the minimum specs for Renoise. The CPU is running at about 10.00% when using the VSTis.
If this isn’t something I could fix, I was thinking I could record the sounds I want from my VSTis as clean samples and then play them directly in Renoise. Is there a tutorial anywhere on the best way to do this? I don’t have any other audio editing programs other than audacity.
Thanks for taking the time to read my post, any help wouldbe greatly appreciated!
There’s no reason a VSTi should be ‘clicking’ as you say, unless it’s being produced by the plugin itself and is intended by that particular sound/preset, such as an instant attack on the ADSR or filter envelope, for example.
It would be really useful if you could upload an example Renoise song which demonstrates the problem in all 3 plugins you mentioned, so that we can play around and see if we get the same problem.
The examples uses the phybes VSTi and it’s got horrible clicking all over the riff. : (
A further question I have is that I see Renoise has the ability to turn a VSTi into a sample? Similar to a soundfont? Could someone tell me a little bit more about this as it is only available in the registered version.
The first thing I noticed is that you’re playing the same VSTi instance (00) on multiple tracks, but Phybes itself does not seem to support multiple outputs. In this case you cannot physically have notes playing simultaneously on multiple tracks, so I’ve combined both into a single track instead.
The second thing I noticed is that Phybes has a ‘Mallet’ parameter in the ‘Bar’ section of the interface:
If you enable the solo function here, you can immediately hear that it is producing a very obvious click with each note. So I simply reduced the volume of this to zero.
For what it’s worth, I still occasionally get some tiny clicks/pops in the output of this VSTi. In my opinion this has nothing to do with Renoise - it appears to be related to the polyphony of the VSTi itself. It seems to have a limited number of voices it can play at once, and when you exceed this number then the oldest voice is simply cut off, which creates a click in the output. This may be a limitation of the demo version of the plugin? Not quite sure.
Notice how the first note eventually gets cut off by the others, which results in a click.
It’s not quite as flexible as a soundfont, unfortunately. It’s just a basic ‘freeze’ type option for VST instruments, so that you can save a bit of CPU by rendering notes to samples and use those instead. You will of course lose the flexibility of the real output from the VSTi, as you will not be able to use its envelopes and stuff to alter the output, but it can still be a nice feature when you need it.
dblue, thanks sooo much for that! I’ve learned a few things here. I never knew about the multiple outputs thing, I’ll be sure to check this in future. I’m away from my regular PC for a couple of days but I’ll check your example out as soon as I can.
insanity, thank you for the welcome. I’m still very much a complete beginner but with luck I might have something to share soon.
