I’ve switched careers at my day job to doing sound design for both TV & Film as well as video games. And after a good 17 year run of being a strict Renoise user, now because of work I’m using protools and reaper sometimes.
I still often use renoise A LOT for creative sound design. I haven’t heard of anyone else in the field using Renoise for this yet. But it’s really good. Right now I just use rolling sampler to easily drag audio samples back and forth from renoise to the other daws and that works great.
But I find myself kinda counting in my head how long a sound should be then kinda fine tuning it in protools after. Would be really cool if renoise could play video and I could do sound design to visual cues inside renoise alone. Definetly would be a sweet bonus feature.
Here’s a vibe-coded tool that does what you describe. Tested it quickly with an .mp4 file (on Windows) and it works great. The video plays in its own always-on-top resizable window and syncs to Renoise playback and pattern changes, even when stopped.
The tool needs the free-open-source MPV player in order to work. Just download this version, unzip it into any folder and then point the tool to the .exe
Here’s a version that supports BPM/LPB changes. Tested it only with a BPM change and it works fine, of course the video stutters momentarily when switching between two BPM’s but it seems to keep in sync.
Seems like using rewire with Reaper+Renoise would work well for this, have you tried that? I guess you’d have to use an old version of Renoise to get rewire back, but that’s what I would do if it were just for one off sound design projects. I find it hard to imagine Renoise will get something as feature complete as Reaper’s video support. I use it a ton and it works great.
@Mano.G Yes, I was kinda hoping this post would drum up a reply like this. Will fire this up tonight! Thank you my friend.
UPDATE: I haven’t tried it yet but I think I’m gonna need a player that works in Mac.
@Skolskoly I did consider this but haven’t given it a shot yet, have you tried this? I’m a huge sucker for the features in the latest renoise update. Not sure I could live without a few of them anymore.
@Skolskoly is right. I just tested the Reaper/Rewire/Renoise workflow with a video and works fine (I keep a Renoise v3.4.4 in my setup because I used Reaper/Renoise together on many of my older tracks).
But, MPV is cross-platform and a MacOS version is available. So, give it a try.
EDIT: This is a MacOS version of the tool, of course I couldn’t test it. Here are some instructions provided by ChatGPT:
This version preserves the Windows tool’s features, including BPM/LPB timing maps, video offset, cursor following, mute, always-on-top and accent-free rounded buttons.
Install mpv using:
brew install mpv
The tool automatically checks the standard Apple Silicon and Intel Homebrew locations, MacPorts and /Applications/mpv.app. Homebrew currently provides mpv for both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.
The macOS version uses mpv’s JSON IPC through a private Unix-domain socket, as recommended by mpv, with a bundled bridge based on macOS’s built-in nc and tail; it does not require Python or socat.
I recently came across the same predicament as you…
I used to use Reaper+Rewire to fill my video syncing needs, but then the newest update removed Rewire. After looking around I ended up buying VidPlayVST and it has been working nicely for me. The interface won’t win any awards, but it has everything I need for making soundtracks for videos/storyboards. From my experience it stays perfectly in sync no matter the LPB/BPM changes, and the timing is spot-on. There are other neat features that I briefly made use of, like playing the video on cue via a note, hit points, and some others you can see on the site. I can also visually seek through the video via the scroll wheel(!) on playback mode (doesn’t do that in recording mode, I use the enter button in that case) which has been amazing to utilize at times.
Feel free to try the demo on the site if you’re interested.
@RiDylan
Well, I used rewire once or twice, but not for video, just experimenting with some tracks. I do find that Reaper’s video features are excellent for manipulating clips of video and audio together, though. The fades, clipping and stretching features work the same for both, so it feels really seamless. It’s great for syncing video to existing audio. But, if you’re doing the opposite, and you don’t need to, or can’t edit the video, then maybe those features don’t matter so much.
I also love the new features in 3.5, so I get it. I just thought it was necessary to mention.