I’m not one to read through entire manuals, so perhaps this is common knowledge, but I discovered this by experimenting and figured it’s too freakin’ cool to not mention it in case others are as clueless as me.
Here’s the situation: I had a large number of related samples and rather than assign each to its own instrument slot I wanted to have a single instrument where keys were mapped to different samples.
I was positive there was a script or tool that would do this, given a folder of sample files. I was positive I had in fact used this myself, but no amount of searching helped me.
I was considering writing my own, but was playing around with Renoise and wondered what would happen if I selected multiple files in my file manager and dragged them all at once to a single instrument slot.
Well, what happens is magic.
When you do this, Renoise automagically maps each sample file to a different key in the sample keyzone mapping. This is exactly what I wanted.
And, even better, you can now save off that instrument for reuse in other Renoise songs.
This is an amazing time saver.
I haven’t checked to see if it preserves folder order, but once you have the xrni file it’s seems trivial to open it up and adjust things.
I may play around to see if the names of the files play any role in the order in which they are assigned to keys.
Yeah it makes it into a “drum kit” automatically. Really useful if you have stems you want to mix in Renoise too. I’ve recently been making some chiptunes in Famitracker, exporting the stems, and then dragging them into the sampler.
The name of the samples are arranged chronologically when you drag them to the sample keyzones. You may also arrange the samples the way you want in windows explorer and drag them directly into the sample keyzones, but then it will automatically assign one sample per key, while if you do it within renoise you can choose how many keys one sample should cover by dragging them to different parts of sample keyzones. Very useful if you have a set of samples that only contains a sample for every third halfnote and so on.
Yes dropping low I think selects 2 octaves per sample, and up high selects one semitone per sample.
I have created a tool that reads out a directory for files named “Some Instrument C-1”, through eg “Some Instrument G#7” and automaps them to the corresponding places each 6 semitones apart and spreading the whole keyboard. If you want to check out the source code, check this link. I cannot package it into a xrnx right now because I’m looking for a new server and I’m too lazy to do it manually.