I would like to use my launchkey to control the pattern peogramming functions of renoise.
I would like to be able to push a pad to select its corresponding step in renoise and then press some keys to input the notes and velocity into said step .
Also i would like yo have some kind of midi feedback so i can see which steps contain notes and whcih ones dont.
I thought of asking before embarking into it.
Im ok with lua. And i would appreciate any input.
Thanls in advance.
This is good; some progress has been made in this area, perhaps these links will help to get started:
Even more info can be found by searching these topics on this fourm.
Hth, and thanks for looking into this!
this only works in older versions but was great at tieing hardware into renoise. might be some ideas in there if you dont mind getting stuck into the lua
Ahh renoise workflow is not good for this.
I give up all cintrolllers and things like launchpad to use or extend renoise.
Its just not good for this. Not work well with renoise at all.
how so? if the dialog (custom tool) is not set up properly for midimapping, then it’s the issue of the tool-developer.
you might get a kick out of using the Paketti Groovebox 8120 and seeing which bits you need out to midi up.
I mean:
A groovebox is a ready to use and play machine.
Track /sample or kits right?
In renoise there is no such a tool to use this way.
Its need to be configured over and over again and boring and get lost the vibe and the influence of music making.
If i turn on my groovebox hardware , i dont need to setup anything. Its just work like that.
If i connect a Launchpad to renoise. It is do nothing!
There is no track selection, no sample browsing methoods , no mixing workoround and so on. This means its useless.
We try some mackei hui controllers but that is also useless in renoise.
Only softube console what i use inside. But console use vst. So its not what we talk about here.
Wouldn’t say it is useless, as you can setup midi-mappings and write scripts for tighter integration and custom needs, this only has to be done once for a controller then you can use it for groovebox-like workflow.
It’s true that Renoise is not an out-of-the-box-groovebox but it’s possible to get there, I suppose reviving the Duplex stuff would be a good step towards starting with custom controller settings. The issue is that not a lot of people want this and those who do probably have different controllers, which is probably why the Duplex project didn’t get updated much.
i get what you’re saying. i could modify the Paketti Groovebox 8120 so that you can set your own kick,snare,hihat,clap,perc,perc,rim,ride folders and everytime you boot it up with empty instruments, it auto-loads 120 of each randomly from the folder + subfolder. it’d streamline the “getting ready to”.
it’s a good idea.
i’ll add it to my todo-list.
this would mean, you boot up the dialog for the groovebox, and the samples get loaded and you can just start inputting steps. straight away.
I think a big part of a groove-box script would be to implement bi-directional communication for midi pads that have LEDs. So that you can build patterns without looking at the screen.
The annoying aspect is that there is no standard way to light up and color pads, some controllers use note+velocity, some cc, custom sysex and so on, some have RG pads, 7 or 128 color RGB or just 1 bit etc. I think Duplex was meant to abstract this away a bit, but I only skimmed it.
yeah i’ve been wondering about that. seems like this is something that Renoise should take care of natively, rather than tool-builders trying to address each and every possible permutation of it, separately. and then maintain something.
and yes, obviously button feedback (say, 16 step buttons lighting up & staying lit until they’re toggled off on the dialog or from the midicontroller) is a thing that needs to happen.
i don’t really know how much work Duplex needs to be able to do this in 2025 and till perpetuity, but i feel like it’s not gonna be me who starts maintaining Duplex. or reviving it. i’ve found looking at other people’s tools that are like v2.8 compatible etc, a harrowing experience, because most of the time nothing makes sense (classes? _self this .self that total chaos)
but what i can definitely do is a hotelsinus hinted at, i.e. improve my 8120 so that it can have a hotelsinus button that just loads kicks, snares, hihats, etc, or, slots1 slots8 with a custom prompter each and do the subfolder snooping and thus load stuff. it could be a nice way of improving things. I’ll call it the hotelsinus button. and something something preferences.
yes u have rights
The problem is that this needs testing and it’s unreasonable to expect any dev, Renoise official or otherwise to have tens of different controllers at hand, so this must be a community effort.
It might be a good idea to create a DAW and language agnostic library/database around controller specs that contains such mappings and capabilities, like a set of JSONs with information about different controllers. This would be useful for anyone trying to implement these interfaces for any software.
I’ll research a bit later to see if I can find something like that (or what can be extracted from Duplex in this sense) and try starting it if there is no such thing. Unfortunately I only have one such controller at hand and it’s not a popular one.
Hello,
I’m working on my controller for L_mini_mk3.
The controller responses are fine, color display and other things work as well.
Unfortunately I still have to decipher some sysex messages from Novation Components
that are not documented anywhere.
Hello everybody!
I think everybody is missing the point here.
We dont need to design a tool for every single controller out there.
We could do with just a decent, simple midi api built into renoise (or any other daw for that matter).
for example:
CC 101 on Channel 16, with value 1 selects track 1.
CC 102 with value 1 selects step1,
then, whatever note you input or any other ccs in a different midi channel, are recorded into that single step.
Then CC102 with value 2 selects step 2.
and so on and so forth.
and when you press play, the daw sends out a midi cc (for example CC105) and its value represents the step being played. so the controler can receive feedback as to what is happening in the daw.
this is just an example, but think about it. If such thing existed on any DAW, us as users could use simple scripts with tools like TouchOSC (which does lua) or a simple html with web midi and javascrpt, sitting between the controller and the daw.
and said script could easily customize how the controller interacts with the daw. and the daw would basically serve as the sequencing engine for whatever workflow we could come up with and code in our script.
And so everybody could basically design their own workflow, all you would need to do would be to set up a template on renoise or any other daw, and then you could do step sequencing without looking at your computer.
We dont need to cather to every existing midi controller, thats absurd and thats the reason with all of these tools fail. We just need a daw with a simple midi api that we can build our workflows up on.
I’ve been looking for this for years.
I even designed my own thing with TouchOSC but since it lacks midi clock, and i have to feed it an external midi clock signal, timing is wonky because of midi jitter.
There is a midi api in Renoise, see the scripting docs on midi
https://renoise.github.io/xrnx/guide/midi.html
You can also midi map certain things in the gui
https://tutorials.renoise.com/wiki/MIDI_Mapping
Feedback is not trivial thanks to different controllers using different midi messages to control their pad leds.
“Feedback is not trivial thanks to different controllers using different midi messages to control their pad leds.”
but that could be taken care of by a script running in between renoise and the hardware.
Can this midi api allow me to edit an arbitrary step in the way in which i described?
would it provide me with things such as a midi cc out to broadcast the sequencer state (ie: playhead location, play status, etc?)
Yes, the tool api is quite extensive but you’ll have to program the association of different messages to actions. You can read more about how to get started and what you can access in Renoise in the docs, and the forum is here if you get stuck.
T
This is what i needed to know.
Im honestly not a tracker guy, so i only downloaded renoise when i heard about its lua scripting capabilities. So if i can use in that way then ill be very happy
thank you very much.
i’ve been happily writing these into Paketti for quite some time.
and
and i’d be delighted to add some more stuff… shoot me a message with suggestions and i’ll have a look.
now, the “from renoise to midicontroller” bit is not what i’ve been looking into, and it seems like something someone else should do.
