Renoise has 64 tracks each capable of playing 10 notes at once. In theory that means 640 notes playing at once!
So I ran a test with in Renoise playing 170 Notes from all octaves at once (I did not bother to write more notes…) from 3 different samples (1 short 75kb, 1 inbetween 1mb and one large 5 mb (I know there are 1 gig samples but hey). playing on 64 tracks…
It played. Though it sounded terrible…Had to turn down the master volume. Also I´m not sure it actually could play all those at once. Because after a time it was hard to spot the difference.
But I think it did because when some of the shorter samples faded the long ones where still playing…
I even added some effects like a big delay on some tracks and Instrument volume envelope settings to the samples…And it still played without crashing!
hum… well as far as I know, playing the same note at the same pitch and at the same time in diffent tracks is like amplifying it by 100%.
If you did this, then no surprise you had to lowel the master. I remember putting, in a very old .xm years ago (when I was young and crazy ), the same “explosion” sound on 8 tracks… I wanted a “special effect”… the kind of effect that can blast your ears/speakers/head … and there where only 8 tracks at once…
Otherwise, it may also related be to numerous memory/disk accesses (I don’t know how Renoise handles samples, just speculating) that can’t be handled by your computer…
Finally, I had many problems with Audigy and Asio, so it might also be related to this…
Actually I also tried with 120, with VSTis and samples (10 voices of each), VSTis where The Grand, Halion String Edition, Synth1, Virtual Guitarist (one voice), and the result was good… I mean, it did not sound like music, but sounded ok for a big noise… Renoise.exe becomes 40Mb larger (because of VSTi samples) which isn’t too much…
Ok, the truth is: Renoise is strong… and there is lot of pleasure ahead, if you have a “decent” pc…
A doubling in the sample volume means only an increase of 6dB. The human ear is not linear.
An example of doubling of the dB value would be from normal speech (60dB) to a very(!) loud concert (120dB). I think jet plane engines lie around 130dB, which is pretty much “say goodbye to your ears”… Actually, the possibly lethal level are not much far from that either
and btw, according to Fourier, a lot of frequencies mixed together gives white noise… and any good spectrum synths prove it, i recently mixed 256 sin waves and got almost while noise (with somekind of “robot” effect sounding)…
Well that’s just a tad inaccurate
All music consists of a lot of frequencies mixed together.
A white noise signal has a uniformly random combination of frequencies. Simply put, a lot of frequencies with no system to it.
Brown noise has also a random combination of frequencies, but the amount of each frequency will roughly follow a pattern much like a gaussian curve, ie like white noise passed through a sort of bandpass filter so an area of the frequency spectrum is louder than the frequencies above and below.
Harmonic signals (which we percieve as musical tones) have frequencies that are integer multiples of a common base frequency (which is what we call the pitch). So an A=110Hz has frequencies 110, 220, 330, 440, 550 etc…
in the end it seems that, from what I’ve seen, this test is not really useful… mainly because it is hardware dependent… Moreover, depending on if you use midi/vsti/sampled instruments, things can vary a LOT.
I think that, on a moderate computer, if you are using vstis, you can expect renoise to work with 32-64 ch (depends on vstis and DSPs used…), maybe 200 ch or more with samples only (but, how is it possible to use so many tracks at once?!), and an almost illimitated number of midi devices. In the latter case, you got to be rich because hardware synths just can’t be instanciated as soft ones…
Octaves of the tones go like you describe A=110,220,440,880,1760,
since an octave up means a doubling of the base frequency of the note.
I was refering to the overtones of a musical tone.
well… 330 is more like E than A anyway, and 550 sounds like C#… there is no anthing liniar in tones… anyway, it’s offtopic… the frequency theory doesn’t have to be mentioned with a musical tones… it’s more about higher mathematics than music.
You miss my point. All sounds consist of a sum of frequencies with different amplitudes. What sounds like a musical tone to us is a sound that consists of harmonic frequencies which are integer multiples of the base frequency (which is the pitch). So for an A=220Hz, the sound consist of not only the 220Hz tone (except if you have a pure sinustone) but also of the overtones 2220=440, 3220=660 etc.
i didn’t miss your point… overtones is more musical thing than mathematics. i was talking more about mathematics than music. there is difference between these things, maybe even big one.
Since we’re talking about the frequencies of musical tones, I don’t see how you can separate the two . The mathematics we talk about is nothing more than a description of sounds, musical or not. I don’t get what you’re trying to say here.
well, mathematics (classic deterministic) say A=A, it doesn’t say A=A+110…
you have no “overtones” in mathematics (classic deterministic). we talk here about pure sin waves. Fourier says all “sounds” (waves) can be re-build with infinite number of pure sin waves. mathematics (classic deterministic) doesn’t have “random function”, so, you need to use infinite number of sin wave to build real (mathematical) white noise. i hope you’ll get my point now.
. The mathematics we talk about is nothing more than a description of sounds, musical or not. I don’t get what you’re trying to say here.