Separating Instruments And Samples

Ideas & suggestions
1

Just as an interesting exercise, I’ve been working on a few songs that use only a few samples. In one song, I’d like to share one sample between instruments, but I can’t seem to do this. Specifically, I’d like to have instruments that use the same sample but use different volume, panning, etc. envelopes (as well as other settings). The sample is small, and I know it would be inexpensive just to copy it, but that isn’t always the case, especially with sampled instruments for which there are many samples at different pitches.

I think Renoise should expose instruments and samples separately (that is, samples should not be exclusively associated with a single instrument). An instrument should be able to reference a sample from an independent list. Something like this:

  
+-------------+-------------+  
| Instruments | Samples |  
+-------------+-------------+  
| 00. X0 | 00. X |  
|=01.=X1======| |  
| 02. X2 | |  
+-------------+ |  
| 00. X (00) | |  
| | |  
+-------------+-------------+

Here, the instrument X1 is selected, and the samples used by X1 are listed below. Sample X is just a reference to X in the song’s sample list. This way, X0, X1, and X2 can all share sample X. Any adjustments to sample X will be reflected in those instruments, and those instruments all have independent parameters.

Thoughts?

Edit: Thanks for fixing the display of the table text, dblue! I tried code tags, but they didn’t work either. php tags work great.

2

It’s already been suggested by other users in the past. I’m confident that it’s something we’ll eventually see in Renoise. A major rewrite of the instrument system has been planned for quite some time now.

It’s not really a forum problem, per se. By default, browsers simply do not render multiple spaces in HTML - they just get reduced down to a single space character. However, you can get around this in HTML by using the 

 tag, which displays text as monospace and respects the correct amount of spacing. On most forums you can use the [php] bbcode tag for this purpose, which is actually intended for displaying source code within your post, but also works very well to display other forms of monospaced text, like so:


  
+-------------+-------------+  
| Instruments | Samples |  
+-------------+-------------+  
| 00. X0 | 00. X |  
|=01.=X1======| |  
| 02. X2 | |  
+-------------+ |  
| 00. X (00) | |  
| | |  
+-------------+-------------+  
  



:)