I’ve recently starting digging deep into my archives of old songs, including stuff not made with Renoise.
A lot of it I have bounced as wave files, wanting to do some mastering and mixing in Renoise.
As I mount these samples in a pattern and enable autoseek I can play around with the song structure, jumping from pattern to pattern, trying out the chorus before the verse etc. Ofc, it’s still just some wave files, but its a highly creative and rewarding thing to do when revisiting these old songs.
And then it struck me, that a tool could really assist with this type of workflow! Because although autoseek is awesome it doesn’t allow you to swap song parts. You have to do this stuff in realtime, hear how well it works and then, painstakingly create it by slicing up the source sound.
So the basics of the idea is to have a tool that can automatically determine the playback position of a sample and, with a single shortcut, slice and produce a note at the cursor position in the song.
This takes the pain out of that particular workflow and makes it easy to e.g. replace a few bars with something else.
There would be some limitations, of course. Realistically it would not be able to recreate the effects of pitch/trigger commands (already, autoseek imposes some restrictions of its own - no modulation of pitch).
Anyways, just wanted to stick the idea out here and perhaps, get some feedback.
Great idea! I needed this tool some weeks ago. I wanted to convert a heavy project to simple light cpu grouped-track in order to do some live manipulation. Also, it’s very usefull if you want to “renoisize” tracks that are coming from other people using other softwares.
Another limitation: if the track has a long duration and/or a lot of patterns, a single instrument would be missing samples slots. As an example, if the number of resulting cuts is 499, renoise would throw the message: “too much sample slots needed”… I can’t remember, but the max sample slots number is around 75-90…?
This would be a cool way to remix old tracks, also interested in this as I just got an OP1 and that records things to a 4 track which can be imported in as long wav files… this tool idea would help then to remix the files… would be quite a nice workflow
So the basics of the idea is to have a tool that can automatically determine the playback position of a sample and, with a single shortcut, slice and produce a note at the cursor position in the song.
This takes the pain out of that particular workflow and makes it easy to e.g. replace a few bars with something else.
So it wouldn’t auto slice a big wave file according to pattern lengths in the project, slicing & placing note-events in the pattern editor at every pattern start (something which the track freeze tool does;https://forum.renoise.com/t/new-tool-2-7-2-8-track-freezing/32936 ), but be more of a manual thing? Cool B), but imo auto-slicing according to pattern edges (optionally be able to set the amount of patterns) and or sub divisions (bars) would even be handier. I guess this would only really work if you know the renders original bpm, the beats align in the new project, otherwise you’d still need to apply some manual sample editor finetuning getting the render to process right.
Maybe you can hack the phrasemate tool to auto slice a big ass wave into multiple phrase instruments and automatically place them into the patterns like dblue’s slices to pattern tool .
@djeroek, yes I’m aiming for something that interferes as little as possible when you’re “in the pattern”
And while the freeze track tool is cool, it will bounce to individual samples, right? I want to keep the original sample in one chunk for as long as possible…
But as usual you have some good ideas. Splitting at cursor is possible with a simple shortcut, what you’re proposing (interval based splits?) is possible with a little more input from the user, would probably require some UI where you configure scope/interval size etc.
Oh, and: beat-matching tempo is easy/fun, as long as the source has a stable BPM. Variable BPM is not really going to work with this tool idea.
And while the freeze track tool is cool, it will bounce to individual samples, right? I want to keep the original sample in one chunk for as long as possible…
yep, it will create a multi sample instrument in which the render is divided among multiple sample slots. I can imagine if interval splits would make into your proposed slicing tool, depending on the songfile length and chosen interval distance, it would create hefty instruments file-size-wise. Destructive splitting still would be nice to have as an option imo. Be able to phrasemate the acquired instruments to phrases for remixing in crazy transpositions with the original content .
Oh, and: beat-matching tempo is easy/fun, as long as the source has a stable BPM. Variable BPM is not really going to work with this tool idea.
If beatmatching and finer slicing interval settings would be added you can probably get away with bpm deviations from the original, still have it sound reasonable good. If the slices would have (crossfading) loops at the end, you could control the decay and control sample lengths of the individual slices. The amount of slices on a +4 minute song though , maybe start of with your initial idea first .
danoise, any news here? Would love to see this tool soon Would be awesome really, just like you said, for remixing. Also would love to have kind of selection->split to new sample. So no render to sample.
I’ve been deep in toolage tonight … actually wanted to resume work on this one, but ended up testing a bunch of other things. and adding issues to github
Damn, time flyes… but, maybe that’s OK because:
it’s the kind of functionality which could be implemented in to renoise natively and extended/developed a lot further.
Sounds like you have ideas?! Apparently I’m still in the “gathering intel” phase a bit longer.
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, maybe start of with your initial idea first 
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Would be awesome really, just like you said, for remixing. Also would love to have kind of selection->split to new sample. So no render to sample.