The pluggin grabber function for VST/AU instruments is very helpful but no such feature exists for external instruments. Absent such a feature (please do it!), what tips, tricks, or processes have people found useful for building multi-sampled Renoise instruments from hardware synthesizers? I’m talking about velocity layers, individual key samples, loops, etc.
As of right now my process is as follows:
Spend an hour creating markers
There must really be a better way? 
Save an empty song with a single track and the number of patterns you want to have notes. Enter the relevant note at the start of each pattern. You will likely want a Note Off somewhere, say 3/4 of the pattern down, to catch any Release stage.
Load your external sound, adjust the length of the patterns so your resultant note is the length you want. Can be done by changing BPM if preferred (ensuring Note Offs are kept.)
Render Song, Save Each Pattern As Separate File ticked.
This is a fantastic idea! How do I force Renoise to respect track output assignments on Render? Ie: A realtime-render will route all tracks regardless of hardware outputs to the master output making Silent Way resampling not possible.
Sorry I don’t know what Silent Way is.
As far as I know all audio interface outputs are silenced on Render and thus you currently can’t have a single going out of the computer to be processed and back in. I know this has been requested in the past and I don’t think it was done by 2.8 beta (although I would love to be proved wrong and may well be.)
I thought you were just meaning to multi-sample external instruments easily, similar to how the Plugin Grabber works…
I might be able to work around this in the meantime, I’ll try a few things today. Your tip still holds though, the Silent Way bit is the edge case. Thanks!
Uhm, yeah it is. Suddenly i feel like like an idiot for rendering a 5 minute song and then manually cutting all the samples out. I swear there used to be an ‘offline tool’ that i can no longer find that put together renoise instruments according to sample names. I may be getting this mixed up with some sort of xi instrument maker, though, 'cause i can’t remember exactly.
This may be somewhat helpful if you can find it but it would be too old to assemble your velocity layers and such stuff for you.
Or you might really have more success creating instruments in some other format (that you already have tools for or a comfortable workflow with) and importing them into renoise with the Additional File Format Import Support tool by mxb. This is a really cool tool. I wish it worked with my asr, but anyway… I find that some text file editing to put together sfz files works well for me and is actually easier than what gui tools i have access to. Combine this with kazakore’s bonehead simple=brilliant way of dogging up a sample pool, i can see one creating a ton of quality multisampled xrni’s with minimal tweaking and no cash blown on some half baked ‘autosampler’ program. I mean, it requires some work, but way less. And at least all your hard work will be there in different formats.
Yes, I would also love to see such functionality. The E-mu Emulator X sampler has it, and also SamplERobot, I think. Would be awesome if this could be implemented in Renoise
Renoise 2.8 has “Destructively Render slices” in the sample editor context menu (Slices → Destr…). You would still have to manually add slice markers to mark your cut points, but renoise would then do the cutting to separate samples for you.
No need for an offline tool.
That’s incredibly handy. I haven’t used that and but i will now. Very nice also for sampling drum machines, just sample the whole machine one note at a time to one long wav, press the auto detect beats/transients button, and presto-automatico: you magically have a drum instrument. Most people probably know that one.
Most renoisers also probably know that xrni format does also have a separate text editable lurking within it. Most human beings will want to use an xml editor to work with these, not notepad but… I didn’t mention because i have very little experience with it compared to sfz, soundfonts and stuff. But it seems to work in a similar way to the sfz thing expect all zipped up.
My tip was really about how I find note mapping the most tedious part of working with any sampler. If you have a semi-complex sampling project with tons of samples and velocity layers etc., it is easier to establish a convention for your sampling so you can just reuse a text file instead of using the gui to do the same thing over and over. Say you wanna sample ‘what the’ from your alpha juno at every 3rd or 5th at three (or however many) velocity layers. That would be groovy. But you also want to do the same thing with your piano patch in your esq. And you kind of want to do the same thing with the sax preset on your gf’s casio for some reason. Don’t sample and map them all, just sample each board the same way and use the same name scheme for each sample project and reuse the same text file so that all the pitch and velocity mapping is already done. Once you avoid doing the same work multiple times, it becomes easy… as long as you make long samples and don’t care about loop points… but that’s, uhm, it’s own thing, and all i can say about that is turn off your synth’s chorus and turn on your coffee maker?
edit: your tip is still the best barring a need for velocity layers and even then is very useful for building sample pools if you take the samples out of different xrnis made at different velocities then combine them into one with some modding of your xml file to work with renoise’s auto naming conventions. excuse long post, maybe i’m too excited about this.