The current iteration of Renoise incites the user to get back to basics and use samples for sound design and instrument creation. However, in order to create a big bunch of different instruments just a few samples can be used, e.g. one can use a single sine wave to generate whole drumkits but to do that one has to copy samples over and over, increasing the module size, as well as increasing the amount of time it takes to save a song.
It could be circumvented by reusing samples. For example, one could use aliases the same way as in the Matrix view, where a sample from a specific instrument can be aliased to other instruments. It appears that it should be easy enough to embed into the current GUI, for instance one could do:
right click on a specific sample -> select “Copy as Alias”
then switch to the target instrument:
right click on an empty sample -> select “Insert as Alias”
In this fashion one would not be forced to have duplicate samples in the song.
For me, this is helpful when dealing with stereodetuned chipsamples for example. You need two (or more) different samples for detuning, but still want to keep them identical while tweaking a sample with the drawing tool. That’s my scenario. I bet there are more cases where you want to modulate and process one sample simultaneously in several different ways.
That is right, that was my mode of thinking initially, in classical trackers one would use the same sample a lot in different instruments.
In modern times, once I found myself having to copy a huge 100mb+ piano instrument in order to have different envelopes, as the result my file got huge and took ages to save.
YES +1000000000 from me!!!
Also, bonus points if <= 2.8 instruments can load samples with multi-keyzone samples as aliases, instead of making a bunch of copies like it does now.
This new limitation of 1 sample == 1 keyzone kind of breaks a few things for me />
you can fake sample aliases right now through a workaround, adding slice markers on top of each other at the start of a sample, then (when having the first sample selected) toggling the slice playback icon (icon next to slice sensitivity percentage top right of sample editor gui).
This way you can detune samples, differ them in volume and panning from each other, though modulation envelopes will work globally.
…this and relative tempo change commands ZT0x / ZT1x which i believe would be trivial to implement - but both these features would be immensely useful!!!