Program Change Does Not Work

How to reconstruct the bug :

  • create two MIDI instruments
  • set Program 2 on instrument #1 and Program 4 on instrument #2
  • Create a pattern playing instrument #1 and instrument #2 variantly

You’ll see that the first played program will be used for all instruments, so all instruments
play singleton with program #2 but instrument #2 should play with program 4.

I’d say this is definitely a bug, isn’t it ? :unsure:

Be sure each midi instrument has it’s own channel assigned.
If you use the same channel for the two instruments you can’t for sure play both instruments at the same time.
Also program changes are only send during set-up of the instrument.
Any other instant program change could be done through the pattern effect command column.

I controlled just one instrument - if I have i. E. a synth that has NO “multimode” (a set of presets so that the synth can play different voices of the set at the same time on different channels), it is very useful if I can define instruments in the tracker on the same channel with different programs NOT playing it and the same time but the synth switches between the programs fastly depending on the tracker instrument. Because Impulse Tracker has this behaviour I thought this is normal, but I don’t wanted to impose bugs on renoise - just thought of improvement.

;)

This was somewhat covered in the end of this bug report and i think the things said there reflects the opinions of the renoise developers about how things should be. After thinking a bit about it, i agree with them regarding the issue you just described. Automatically changing programs before triggering a note would introduce latency, and possibly introduce other problems. It’s better to change the program number via the effect column manually, even though it’s a less clean approach.