Hi, and as always i apologize if this has been mentioned before.
I find that there is one limitation in renoise when using and controlling VST instruments - renoise will only (i think?) access the first 16 parameters of a VSTi. This means that if you want to tweak the cutoff in a VSTi for instance with the renoise LFO, the cutoff variable must be among the first 16 ones. On quite a few VST instruments, this is not the case.
The 16 parameter limit in renoise does make a lot of sense and integrates nicely with the hexadecimal system. However, it might be better if 16 slots could be arbitrarily populated with parameters using a mechanism like midi learning.
It might work like this:
I drop a VST routing meta-device in my DSP chain. Next to the slot with the value is a button with the text “Learn”. I press that button (which stays depressed) and then i open the control window of the VST i’m using. I then change the value on the cutoff knob/slider in the VSTi, and then close the window. Now i look at the VST routing meta device, and see that the Learn button has been raised, indicating that it has successfully learned the location of a specific control variable in the VSTi.
You can fill the first 14 parameters with any arbritrary parameter you like so it’s not just “the first 14”, you have 14 droplists that contain ALL parameters that go with the VSTI.
So if the cutoff is not within the first 14, pick a parameter you don’t want to alter and click it’s droplist, then pick the cut-off parameter from the whole list.
If you need to tweak more than 14 parameters at the same time, add another VSTI automate device and pick the extra parameters that didn’t fitted in the first 14 of the previous one, there.
I’m sure that 14 sliders will be enough for one metadevice in general use.
The learning option may be a good idea since not all parameters of VSTI’s are having a logical name.