I’ve brought this issue up many times in the past, but I think it’s a nice time to bring it up again. The above image is from the latest version of Reaper, and I’d like very much for this feature to be in Renoise.
Why?
For a while now it has been public knowledge of round trip latency with consumer soundcards, which is what most of us are running Renoise on. Renoise can currently automatically compensate for a recording latency, but only per the set buffer size. You can manually enter in your own compensation time, but ONLY in ms, not in a samples value. ms is not accurate enough.
I record a lot of vocals. Like, a REAL lot. While I’m trying and trying to get the best take I’m tracking the vocals myself in Renoise. Because of the above issues, I have to manually, by using the mouse and the sample zoom function, cut out the correct amount of samples from the start of each take to obtain near-perfect sample synchronization. The amount is the buffer amount, as well as the extra small latency in my hardware (in my case it’s 39 samples). If you don’t do this the vocal take can sound limp, a little bit more out of tune, and not as snappy with the background music. If you do 100 takes for a song, this manual process is very annoying and extra hard work that makes trying to get that ‘best take’ frustrating.
Reaper sets this their master configuration, but Renoise could easily house this function in the recording window. Even if it were as simple as changing the current dialogue value box from ms to samples, that would be such a workflow improvement.
I’m keen to hear what the community and the devs think about this. Let me know if I’ve written any of this in an unclear way.
If it’s all there within Renoise then it makes for a better workflow, no need to ReWire or anything like that. Other than this small but very important niggle, I quite like the recording sync in Renoise and how you can record samples locked to patterns, and use the cool sample ruler system for edits. I really think an addition of sample level control of the latency correction wouldn’t mean a major code overhaul or any paradigm shifts. And, if it is implemented then that’s another important claim of accuracy that Renoise can boast: sample accurate latency correction for near-perfect sync.