There’s a feature that i’ve loved in MOD Plug Tracker for ages that makes it really easy to export my songs to other DAWs but appears to be missing in Renoise:
Being able to solo/mute instruments and rendering “What you hear” to disk. Currently, i find the rendering to disk options limiting because i cannot single out specific instruments (or tracks). All i see for rendering options is Song, Selection, Pattern. It should have: Song, Selection, Pattern, Track, Instrument and “What You Hear.”
What do you think?
UPDATE: OpenMPT recently added the option on wave export to “save separate file for each instrument.” this makes it even easier to export multitrack materials to other DAWs.
You can render selection of any size and selection of tracks in the Matrix to file.
Do you really need much else?
And isn’t What You Hear basically the whole song? You mute a bunch of tracks and export you will get What You Hear, with those tracks muted, like you seem to be talking about.
admittedly i have not tried the Matrix at all. thanks for the note about that.
i didn’t know it rendered to disk based on what’s solo/muted. thanks for letting me know. i saw nothing about it anywhere so i had no reason to guess that it did. then again, that’s how MOD Plug Tracker works (trial and error). thanks again for pointing this out.
Still, it would save a lot of manual work if i could just right-click an instrument and choose “solo” before i export.
Wanted something similar too, since i tend to spread my instruments into various tracks and the rendering by track is kinda messy then. Since there was rendering scripting added recently to Renoise it shouldn’t be too hard to script. Save each instruments volume setting into an internal table, then loop through all instruments, restore the current rendered instrument original volume, set all others to -inf, call render song for each instrument.
Busy currently with other things but if no one jumps in i’ll program that when i have more time.
An advanced version could even allow instrument render groups to be defined, so you can render out a drum track in one go for example.
yes, that’s exactly my issue. i should have said as much, thanks for speaking up
that would be very cool. it’s not within my abilities, though, so i hope you get a chance to do it if the Renoise developers don’t feel this is worthy of an actual internal feature addition (i think it is).
Well, i think the scripting is made especially for solving such “issues”. Everyone can extend Renoise with functions they miss, so i don’t really see the need for an official feature, especially with instrument grouping this would require quite a redesign of the current render dialog. The developers can spend their time then focussing on the main application and core features. Writing the tool isn’t that complex at all, so no worries… your request just reminded me and it’s easy to do.
I’m rewriting my snapshot tool currently for the upcoming Beta 7 and will start implementing the instrument rendering afterwards.
ps: you’re my hero of the day for tackling the issue in scripting. my dyslexia makes programming/scripting very frustrating. I’ve enough that I’m pushing myself to cope with already
cheers!
hey there Beatslaughter… had any chance to try this? here i am wanting to export individual instruments again (wherein exporting individual tracks wont help). if not, ok. just checking
PS: kazakore… to refine my reply and define what it is i need… exporting individual tracks isn’t what i need most. as Beatslaughter noted above about his own compositions, i tend to spread my instruments out onto multiple channels (behavior i learned from old tracker note-cut behavior). i’ve never used a tracker with a strict channel-as-track methodology. i tried to keep them organized, but when i wanted notes to not be cut, i’d alternate them along channels for polyphony. so… yeah i do really need something else
actually, having recently had to move form ReNoise to another DAW in a pay-by-the hour mix session, I have to say that solo-instrument render would have been a big advantage.
Sometimes there is a sound that appears on different tracks throughout a song, and finding it using “Find and Replace” is one way, but…
I think render each instrument , respecting wherever it might appear , with routing and effects, yet ignoring all other instruments (unless they give note-offs ) is TOTALLY valid - and would be uniquely a result of the special ReNoise workflow that doesn’t always sit well with other DAW’s in a mix session.
