Something that I do a lot in Sound Forge when working with breakbeats, loops, or any other sample which contains multiple interesting sections, is to add regions around all the parts that I’m working with. This helps speed up the editing process by an incredible amount. The regions themselves might be individual drum hits, phrases within a loop, words or phrases within a vocal, etc. Once I have all the regions I need, I simply use Sound Forge’s “Extract Regions” function and it automatically spits out individual .WAV files for me… nice!
Anyway, that’s not the point. In many cases - especially when working with drum loops - I am creating these individual .WAV files simply because I intend to load them back into Renoise and create a multi-sampled drum kit, or to create individual instruments from each region. So it just occured to me… wouldn’t it be nice if Renoise could actually process these regions for you automatically to remove a lot of the work involved?
Here’s what I propose…
This is my “funkydrummer.wav” as it exists in Sound Forge:
When loading the sample into Renoise, it would detect that the sample contains multiple regions and then ask me how I want to handle them:
If I choose “Generate Drum Kit”, Renoise gives me a nicely prepared multi-sample instrument with a minimum of fuss, just as if I’d loaded 16 single .WAV’s in by hand and then used the Generate Drum Kit function:
On the other hand, If I choose “Generate Instruments”, Renoise will split each sample region off to its own unique instrument:
If I choose “Ignore Regions”, well I’m sure you can guess what happens then.
Finally, it should obviously be possible to disable such a feature if the user wishes to:
For me this would be a massive time-saver since I often prepare my samples in this manner while editing them. I can see this being really useful in many difference situations, too, not simply when dealing with breakbeats.
What do you think?
(he said it)