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Yep, grouped tracks, thats evolution for you! And if they were colour coded, the spectrum analyser could show that group as that colour…to give us the ability (without muting and un-muting tracks) to see frequencys interfering with eachother…just an idea.
really hope this makes it to the next version of renoise 
Great idea.
While I can’t say it’s absolutely killing me that we don’t have this yet, I would DEFINITELY use this feature if it were implemented.
Brendan
It depedends on which kind of music is being composed with Renoise and which kind of composition approach is adopted.
I don’t use many tracks (10 more or less) but for those who compose orchestral music or any kind of music that needs many many track, I think this function would be NECESSARY in order to keep being professional.
So true.
I fired up photoshop the other night, and this is the result. I based the fictional groupings around the
demosong by Vivace, Jong Belegen, with the following configuration:
- tracks 0 - 8 is mostly beat/percussion sounds, and go into a group named “beat group”
- tracks 10 & 11 are bass sounds, and go into a group named “bass group”
- the beat group is shown in a compact manner, while the bass group is shown in the normal way
Scopes:
Pattern editor:
I’m not entirely sure about the way note and effects are being displayed in the pattern editor, but leaving a
compacted group blank is not very useful, and a simple horizontal scale looks like s***. So I decided to
invent a new kind of track display, the “event” display. It tries to tell you a bit about what’s happening inside
the compacted group, without actually going into too much detail.
Also, when a group has been compacted, the cursor will extend to the whole width of the group (in this case it
is spanning 9 tracks). This means that tabbing through the pattern editor becomes faster/simpler - obviously
at the expense of some detail, but we could still keep a lot of functionality in there (if the above image was
real, I’d still expect to be able to hit “insert new line”, and watch the events below the cursor move downwards).
Beautiful, danoise. Perfect. I like the event display. In your vision, does track grouping also have functional implications or is it just a GUI-thing? For example: would you be able to assign DSP’s directly or via Send Tracks to a Track Group?
I am definitely leaning towards a pure workflow improvement (== a GUI-thing), but of course it’s worth considering the potential benefits of a more “complex” solution. Keeping things simple is always a challenge…
I’m really glad this has idea been suggested, I’ve been thinking the same thing too.
It would work well for me if, when you’ve organised all of your tracks into groups, you’re left with a blank pattern editor. You’d then be able to select from a menu which group or groups you’d like to see, and obviously have the option to bring all groups back into view.
When playing the song, and with a reduced number of groups in view, you’d still be able to hear everything else. The simple view would help in focusing on the group or groups you want to edit.
It may just be a simple ‘hide track’ feature I’m looking for, as I’m not using a very large monitor but often end up using twenty plus tracks.
Great idea and great mockups, hope this makes it into development 
Excellent! Just the way I had in mind.
How about a three state button in the scope-groups as well (or two tiny buttons or some other solution like context menu that will appear with the options when you rightclicking the group header…)
One to collapse the group so you only see one scope for the entire group (if this is easily possible without breaking internal signal processing and stuff…).
So either you can collapse/expand/auto-collapse.
The auto-collapse will follow the pattern collapse mode. So when you collapse something in the pattern editor, the scopes will also be collapsed etc…
We could also have a ‘show group(s)’/‘show sends’/‘show ungrouped’ etc options in the scopes. So you will only see the scopes for the selected group together with master, or just the sends or…etc…
All in all a little more flexible system.
The point is that when you get quite many tracks, the scopes gets quite messy the way they are now, especially on low screen resolutions.
+1 i dont understand why it doesnt already have this??it seems like a very basic feature that it is missing.
Very nice mockup danoise.
+1
Perhaps if the line contains pattern commands the event cell would be shaded in a darker grey colour.
With note data a brighter colour, and with note data and pattern commands a slightly brighter than normal colour…
Let’s not forget the novice users here. For some, it’s already pretty hard to understand the relationship between the pattern editor tracks, and the track scopes. I know I’ve had to point out this several times when explaining the tracker interface. Keeping the grouping option visually coupled together should make it easier to understand, since the change is happening in both the pattern editor, the track scopes and (lest not forget) the mixer.
Perhaps, and a context menu option such as “compact all but this track” would be useful too. But - I don’t believe in completely hiding tracks/scopes, so such a feature would require individual tracks to be able to compact as well (unless of course the option automatically converted tracks into groups, and IMO that’s a bit confusing).
Hey, maybe the “effect colors” could be handy here as well? Panning is already slight yellow-tinted, glide is orange etc. Let’s just see how well it would work.
danoise for president. Love the photoshoppery.
Track grouping is a +10 for me!!
In my opinion an arranger is not another way to solve the problem of huge amounts of tracks next to eachother.
Also +10 for the photoshopping of Danoise!!
Looking great danoise. Love it.
I have replaced my example picture with yours in the first post, if you dont mind.
The track grouping suggestion gets a +1 from me too.
In the pattern editor we can already drag and drop the tracks around (re-arrange them in order left to right). And we can right click and select ‘create new track’, etc. It would be great if we could also right click and have “Create New Group track” or similar. Then we could simply drag and drop tracks to that grouptrack. If we double clicked on it, it would unfold into a pattern editor which only contained the tracks assigned to that group.
However, it would help very much at this point just to have a “narrow track” or even “hide track” option on each track.