When working with vocal or song samples it would be very useful if you visually could see where a sample ends in the pattern editor.
I think the solution would be an option to enable/disable some kind of “block-representation” in the sample slot.
Example: if I have a note of a sample-based instrument placed at row 00 and enables the block-representation a block shows (depending on chosen pitch) how long the sample will play.
maybe in the future when there’ll be some kind of horizontal pattern arranger, you can choose to add long samples horizontally with visual representation?
Good question about looped samples! I did not think about it that much because to me the block representation would be most useful with samples that are not looped.
I use mostly short samples. I sample individual notes off my keyboards and synths, would be annoying to have renoise displaying those all the time. And if you’re playing the sample in a different pitch, or pitching it with fx commands then the it would be playing longer or shorter than the original sound. I guess that would use far too much CPU calculation to get it working as you discribed it.
Displaying a waveform would be way too hard, but probably just a small marker somewhere or highligting the area where sample plays, from start to end. Looped samples would go on forever unless you set an offnote somewhere meaning that track for the rest of the song would be highlighted until you place an OFF note somewhere. although. placing an OFFnote if you’re using the envelopes in the instrument edit means it could still be playing looped as long as it’s decaying in volume or something.
offcourse it would be annoying if it was displayed all the time… thats why I described an enable/disable function.
I am also using mostly short samples (looping) and I Guess my described function is a bit narrow in useability but when I am making beats that incorporate longer samples and I want them to fit into the rest of the music the function would save me awful lot of time. Though I would survive without it.
it should not matter if the sample is looped, it still has a waveform so you could still choose to have it visually represented- or not.
this idea would be good for “live”- you could also “mix” tracks with precision.
All ideas are interesting. I also think that displaying the waveforms vertically will cause subsequent problems… sequencer-like colored vertical bars are a better choice. Looped samples can be marked as long as they are played or can be indicated by a loop icon like many sequencers.
There are also other nice suggestions on this matter in earlier topics.
There is just only one con… Unless the structure of how Renoise handles sounds was not changed it would not play back any data unless the “note that emits wave data” would be played. So if you had say overlapping audio data on several patterns they would not play back in the latter patterns unless the first pattern including the beginning of the sample is played back first.