Reusing sample in multiple instruments?

As a long time tracker user I’m used to the concept of instruments decoupled from samples. I’m not sure if this is possible in Renoise, but I want to reuse the same sample in multiple instruments.

For example, a sinewave has tons of uses–kick, lead, pad, etc, especially with the new modulation and effects chains. But duplicating an instrument seems to create new copies of all the samples within the instrument. I just want multiple instruments to be able to reference the same samples.

Maybe there is another way to do what I am looking for though, like having a single instrument, but different effects/modulation for the different sounds it can make, and using pattern effects to switch between these in the song. I can’t find any way to do this though.

Are samples simply contained within instruments, end of story?

Are samples simply contained within instruments, end of story?

Yes, that’s how it works at the moment.

Thanks for your very fast reply.

I would vote for the ability to add references to samples in addition to duplicates, though it’s probably a structural change and probably isn’t requested enough.

In the past it was actually possible to have sample “aliases”, so that a single sample could be re-used and mapped to multiple different keyzones within an instrument.

In 3.0 we decided to simplify the instrument structure somewhat, by removing aliases and forcing each sample to have its own dedicated keyzone mapping. This does unfortunately mean that you’ll occasionally have to duplicate an entire sample to use it multiple times, but it does simplify things a great deal internally, and it hopefully makes the sample:keyzone relationship a bit clearer for users in general.

In the future, who knows… We could potentially see aliases being reintroduced in some new form, or perhaps even a song-wide sample pool that all instruments can share somehow. Food for thought anyway.

A song-wide sample pool would be AMAZING.

I understand how you have to make decisions between simplification and available features. With disk space not being a concern anymore, I can see how this you opted to have samples pooled within instruments. I’m not sure how much of a structural change this would be, but I would also vote for samples being stored at the song level.