I agree, but if you think about it, what I raised above won’t affect old songs because they wouldn’t have any user defined offset points, and thus the offsets would by default fall on 256 even intervals, just like they do now.
This shold give some visualisation to the idea of making ‘tab’ style offsets. It would be the background to the wave editor (ok the colours are bad) so just pretend there’s a waveform overlayed on the image (I can’t do it right now because I’m at work). The yellow lines are the user defined offsets, and the blue and grey lines are the default. Notice the first line on the far left is blue. The yellow user defined offsets ‘cancel out’ all default offsets to the left of them except 0900, and the default offsets to the right of the rightmost yellow offset remain.
arr.
OK, you guys convinced me. Has my vote! Maybe easier to handle than alias samples. 
This would be to get it spot on, according to the maximum resolution supported by Renoise instead of limitations incurred by using the current command style. If you’re trying to sync up two or three larger segments of a breakbeat or similar, the offset command often times doesn’t cut it, and you have to make seperate segments which is kind of tedious. Offset has it’s use, and shouldn’t be removed, but I bid slices/markers adressed through the command column a warm welcome.
The good thing about the idea of laurencedavies is, that you can work the same, if you prefer the old method. For those who wish more control, may move their markers as they like.
Sample offsets and lists have beendiscussed in September 2004 here in the Renoise forum.
The outcome was to have “Cuelists” (you can have 255 cuelists in your entire Renoise arrangement) which can be applied to different samples, let me explain: Imagine you have 6 Audio sample loops which have all the same length. You want to apply the same sample markers (=Cuelist) to each of the loop. You simply make one Cuelist and apply the same for each Loop.
Additionally my idea is, if the sample you’re assigning the Cuelist to has a different lenght, it will stretch/recalculate each offset to match its lenght.
A mockup was posted back then too:
The CALC section was a little tool to calculate the Sample offsets and to fill up the list if you don’t want to edit each entry by hand, this is how it works: Mark in the sample from one beat to the other, and its telling you the distance of the selection. This distance is the offset for each beat, which can be used to generate entries in the cuelist.
Ah well. There goes my ego 
Not a bad idea. Should this work like the automation curve copy/paste/preset interface?
Yeah, that would be intuitive.
Perhaps these ideas could be combined? They don’t contradict one another, so the more hardcore users could enter their own offsets manually, and the gui lovers could drag some tab offsets for quick ‘n’ dirty beat slicing
What happend to this thread? Missed in action? 
i don’t entirely concur with the sentiment that the “traditional offset” approach is obsolete. for those of us who like doing breakbeat programming from the pattern editor, it’s essential. though i do agree that i would like a couple extra digits of precision.
overall i prefer the renoise percentage division approach to IT2’s Oxx + SAx approach. the extra degrees of precision did exist in IT but they were, quite frankly a bitch to use. renoise also gives you a cool assist on the offset usage in the sample editor by explicitly indicating the offset command that would be used to address the highlighted entry point.
i like the idea of rolling tweaks to this feature into an expanded effect collumn upgrade, whereby effect commands could cascade into eachother. so you could just subdivide the current 256 addressable offsets in a sample by a further 256 by stacking 09xx commands, a la:
c-5 01 – -- 094f 0943