Waveform Tuner - A tool for Tuning Single Cycle Waveforms

Renoise Tools
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UPDATE: This tool has been uploaded to the official Tools page:

I recently made a convenient little Renoise Tool which I have been finding very useful, and I was wondering if it was worth sharing with the community.

Waveform Tuner is a simple Renoise tool for tuning single cycle waveforms to C4. This is achieved by taking the length of the sample buffer and adjusting the Transpose and Finetune parameters such that the wave form will loop at C4.

As a convenience the Loop mode is set to forward.

The tool provides an Instrument Box context menu and a Keyboard Shortcut which will tune the currently selected sample.

That’s it - it’s very simple but when you’re working with single cycle wave forms of different buffer lengths, this allows you to keep them all in tune with each other with a single keyboard shortcut.

I made this initially to start learning the Renoise lua api, and I kind of assumed something like this already exists, but I haven’t been able to find any that do exactly this. I think this could be easily confused with the EasyTune tool but it doesn’t do the same thing. EasyTune seems to try to detect the pitch of a sample and adjust it to C, whereas this one works strictly by using the total length of the buffer and calculating the correct pitch adjustment so that it will loop at C4.

So, does this tool already exist? Would it be worth submitting to the official Renoise tool library?

If you’d like to try it out, I’ve uploaded it to Github in the meantime:

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hi, thanks for sharing your code. yeah, there’s been a few, but yours seems to be a worthy addition.

p.s. it seems that the finetune is actually -127 to +127, not 0 to 127. as per documentation

5319:renoise.song().instruments[].samples[].fine_tune, _observable
5320-  -> [number, -127-127]

btw, you can always study the GitHub Action i’ve written for making a .XRNX release:

this will make it so that when you push a commit, it’ll automatically create a release and the package will work - you might need to tweak your code a bit so that it hits the correct folder, etc, but just thought to put this out there.

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Thanks for that! I’ll definitely dig into that if I start working on a more complex tool. Cheers!

Update: also I just realised I had uploaded my xrnx file in an incorrect format (I included the outer folder rather than just the contents.) I believe that’s fixed now.

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This is great, much appreciated.

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Thanks, I’m glad it may be of use! I’ve just been approved as a member of the tool developer group, so I will move ahead with submitting it to the official tool library.

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Waveform Tuner has now been uploaded to the official Renoise Tools page:

I hope it comes in handy! Please let me know if you have any issues or suggestions. Thanks!

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is it similar to;

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Unless I’m totally mistaken about EasyTune, I don’t believe it’s the same functionality. I think EasyTune is actually doing an analysis of the pitch of a longer sample and tuning it so it plays at C. It’s more for retuning a longer clip of audio based on detecting the pitch of the sample. My tool does something quite different - it is intended for use with much shorter single cycle buffers and it doesn’t do any pitch analysis or anything like that. It just bases the pitch adjustment on the length of the buffer itself, assuming it’s a single cycle waveform, and sets it up to loop at C4 (i.e to match whatever note you enter into the pattern.)

To use it I generally hit Create on the sample editor and make a short buffer from as low as 2 samples up to a few hundred or a couple of thousand samples long. Then I press my assigned keypress to retune, and hand draw a wave. You can also clip a wave cycle from any sample you have available, and use the keypress to tune it to C4, regardless of the pitch of the original sample.

If I’m wrong about EasyTune and it already does this, I guess I just reinvented the wheel :slight_smile: It’s a quite simple tool so I wouldn’t be surprised if something already does this exact thing, but this provides a very simple standalone way to get the keypress into your workflow.

EDIT: I took a look at the code of EasyTune and can confirm that it is doing what I assumed it was - it performs a pitch detection based on the actual content of the buffer, and seems to be generally intended more for use with longer samples containing many wave cycles. Waveform Tuner is specifically for single cycle waveforms, and I think it should be more accurate and reliable for that specific use case.

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