Sample Editor Additions

Ideas & suggestions
1

First of all, I just started using renoise and i think it’s a genius peace of software :D
I use it, for now, to lay down beats and other sounds for mainly hip hop tracks. Renoise is from all the things i’ve tried, one of the best and easiest to use to chop up longer samples and hear back quickly what the different parts sound like. For this though, more for instrument samples or effects than for drums, I’d like to have the prehear function a bit advanced. I just bought my first peace of equipment, namely a simple midi keyboard with some knobs n drumpads. midi binding etc it all works pretty well, but with longer samples or loops or whatever, i just like to experiment a lot with the sample effects such as play fw/bw, pitch and vol slide. Now if the sample editor could show me how many lines a sample will run at a certain pitch, or let me lay down a short version of a send track for instance, then i can quickly hear how a sample sounds at different notes when it’s reversed/played backward after running 3 lines. Yeah, maybe that’s an idea, have a special prehear ‘send’ track right next to the sample editor? Perhaps it’s even possible to ‘scratch’ the sample with mouse or a thing like midi controller, a la traktor, and then record those speedups, downs, and fw/bw info into a channel directly. Awesome! Orr, maybe I just need to change my workflow with these things a little bit. Anyway, I added a quick simple mockup for such a thing.
Also, when I slice longer samples up, I’d like to have the option to render the auto-mapped slices to a “normal” instrument, so I could for instance trigger two slightly different snare together with the same note, or even pitch them a little bit, together, with the same root note.
One other thing i miss, is a midi binding for the pattern editor’s scroll bar. You can skip quickly with the pc keyboard arrow keys, but with the knobs i could only throw the bpm up high for a sec and if i could select the position within a pattern with a knob it would make me a happy guy :P ( or at least simulate the F9/F12 keys with midi triggers? ) this would help easier editing as well as even using renoise live.
Let me know what you think.

Further question, which probably doesn’t belong in this subforum: I’d like to help out with the advancement / working out ideas for future renoise releases. Im a software engineering student with music production as a hobby so i might be able to help out. Where do i start?

2

Make some usable prototypes in Lua?

Doing the bindable midi scrollbar, for example, would be fairly trivial. In fact, a lot of your ideas could be built with the API.

If you are serious about contributing back to the community and software engineering, this is the best way to go.

Good times.

3

You do know that you can right click the ruler at the top or bottom of the sample editor and set it to beats/lines don’t you? Unfortunately changing the preview note below it does not change this ruler for being played at different pitches and only way to check that is changing basenote/finetune in the Instrument Settings. Display always assumes it’s being played back at C4, which I’ve stated my disagreement with a few times but don’t think you will see changed anytime soon…

4

That’s a very good idea :) gonna start tomorrow!
edit: about being ‘serious’, about ‘contributing back’ and about ‘software engineering’, well, no. just like making music all of this has to stay a hobby to be fun. I don’t think anybody is earning even a percent of a dayjob programming on renoise now is there? ;D

Ehm, no, i did not know that :). thanks a lot and a bunch. Maybe that’s toolable as well so yeah i’ll try =D

Making a loose ‘prehear’ send track will be a project for when i’m comfortable with the renoise api + lua a bit.