Alright, here’s my wishlist, which should cover everything…
No brainers and general requests:
- External audio FX device to be able to use outboard gear. Should include automatic delay compensation.
- Support for audio input to instrument plugins. (See: Support for routing audio to instrument plugins)
- Add the possibility to modify slopes of the Curve envelope as well, just line in the Lines mode! Currently for complex shapes you need to create multiple segments and adjust the slopes manually by eye, which is a bit tedious and time consuming.
- The Doofer device could use a lot of improvements, such as band splitting, parallel FX chains and built in dry signal mixing. In other words bring it to at least the same level as Live’s “Audio Effect Rack”.
- Crossfading around loop-points in the built-in sampler.
- Granular synenthesis in the built-in sampler.
- Built-in arpeggiator and generative note sequencing functionality (think: MIDI effects in Ableton Live).
Improvements to DSP devices:
- Better oversampling filters to relevant devices (filter devices, distortion), currently the cutoff is set way too low (starts cutting before 17kHz already) and the response is not steep enough. The FIR kernel could just be longer, honestly. This is a really bad flaw imo, since the oversampling filter cuts the high frequencies too severely.
- The distortion in the analog filter doesn’t sound good, since it seems to be just a saturator at the filter output. Would be better to integrate the nonlinearity directly into the filter structure, although I understand it’s challenging with the ZDF filter topologies. It’s still possible though, since it’s been done before, and would be a huge upgrade to the built-in filter sound
- Non-cramping EQ filters. At least something similar to the Orfanidis filters should be the minimum standard these days. Also optional spectrum visualization, M/S mode, “adaptive Q”, possibly a steepness setting alongside just the standard 12db/oct filters, etc.
- Optional multiple taps to the chorus device. Also optionally more analog sounding implementation, since there’s been some solid papers on this recently, and other manufacturers have made their implementations available.
- Better reverbs. The current options are seriously dated and provide limited control.
- Same with the compressors. I can’t say what’s exactly wrong with them technically, but I always found them to sound extremely unsatisfying. Also could use much better visualization, including things like gain reduction history graph.
- There should be more comprehensive utility tools available. E.g. there’s no M/S matrixing built in at all, or the ability to swap L/R channels.
- A proper ping-pong mode in the Multitap delay. The “Ping Pong” option which according to documentation just swaps the L/R channels on repeating echoes, which is not what ping-pong delay is.
- Missing devices: pitch shifter, better saturation device, resonator type device (not talking about just a comb filter), vocoder.
Maybe some day…
- Audio tracks with waveforms visualized.
- A horizontal arranger view.
- An API to make native DSP plugins for Renoise, including the same UI components available to the current native devices. A bit like what Max For Live enables, but without Max, I’d be happy with just C++.
EDIT: a couple more after reading other people’s suggestions:
- “Really truly disable effect/plugin/device without any PDC”.
- More than ±100ms of static track delay.