Routing Problem While Freezing With Energyxt / Renoise

I’ve been experimenting with energyXT 2.5.1 and renoise especially to have an useful freezing option… I found some information about that in another thread around here but eventually I came to another problem: eXT output routing.

The Case:

  1. load energyXT as an Instrument.
  2. add a sequencer to it. sync to renoise.
  3. add an audio channel to it playing a random .wav file (usually the frozen sample)
  4. press play in renoise.

    what happens:

    the eXT-vsti output is directly routed to renoise’ Master.

    What I need:

    eXT-vstis output signal should be on Track01 (or TrackXX nevermind) and NOWHERE ELSE, NOT MASTER, just on that single Track.

What I’ve done:
on the ‘VST Instrument Properties’ Panel of energyXT VSTi I’ve checked the option “Assign to track:” and selected “Track 01” (“Master” was default).

What should have happened:
eXT’s output signal should now be routed through Track01… NOT master, not even both.

What really happend:

  1. eXT’s output signal shows up in Track01 (I can see the scope of the signal in Track01).
  2. Muting Track01 has NO EFFECT. The signal STILL plays on Master as if I had chosen “Assign to Track: Master” before, but I selected “Track01”!

Now this is getting annoying and really confuses me…

I’ve tried the same thing with other VSTis and it worked as intended… (master was silent when muting track01)

does anybody have an idea what I’ve been doing wrong here, or at least some suggestions what I could do to make it work the way it was intended?

(for all who might say: what for? I like the possibility to add some fx to frozen or other static material, which is not possible in this case if the signal is routed directly and unprocessed through master.)

Maybe you are confusing ‘Off’ with ‘Mute’.
Renoise has two way for muting.
There are two buttons (Off and Mute) on the Pre-fader panel in Track DSPs window.

‘Off’ : the track signal will be stopped like when the Note Off command is send
‘Mute’ : the track signal output will be killed

So,

probably, you use the ‘Off’ mode for muting. When syncing with another sequencer, the Note Off in Renoise can’t stop another sequenser’s sounds. So in this case, you should use real ‘Mute’ mode.

At default, the muting behavier is set to the ‘Off’ mode.
You can change the setting at Preferences panel (at the bottom in Plugin/Misc tab).

Then, “Assign to track” should work as you expect, maybe. :)

Thanks satabox, seems I really confused Off with Mute.

changing the setting to Mute instead of Off works as intended. Muting Track01 then really mutes energyXts output signal.

But, this just leads me to another problem: CPU Load ;)

In many cases I want some tracks to freeze with eXT (I really like eXT here instead of native sample playback because it really plays the file at the right location whereever I am in the pattern or song) to lower the CPU usage while working on other song parts.

So if change the mute settings to really “Mute” instead of “off”, the CPU load of the muted tracks is still there, because renoise still plays the muted tracks with all that CPU using gear… it just doesn’t route its signal to Master then… which is again not exactly what I was looking for.

In this case it would be perfect to have an option where I can MUTE and OFF some tracks, accordingly to what I need due to the CPU load or eXT’s behaviour.

But I guess this is currently not possible, is it?

Ok, I just found out Shift-Click MUTEs and Click OFFs - problem solved so far :)