Hi, I'm looking for painpoints / workflow issues that you have with Renoise. Basically anything that makes you lose your flow / slows down your workflow, something simple or complex. I've been scripting my way out of certain workflow issues and missing features, and would love to find out what y'all are missing in Renoise, or what you liked in previous trackers that you used. Any ideas / painpoints would be appreciated.

My main issue with Renoise is how the selection works. In other trackers transpose and value increments apply to the cursor position if there is no selection, and selection is cleared when the cursor is moved. This makes it obvious whats going to be affected when doing shortcuts. In Renoise the selection just stays there and by default, and you need to create a new one for the simplest changes. It also is very distracting if you leave it there.

My workaround has been to use the Clear Selection tool, which adds a shortcut for clearing the selection. I still find it annoying to use the shortcut every time so it's not that good of a fix.

Thanks, WobbleBlast!
Last week, I made a Transpose that works for SelectionInPattern, or Current Row. There are +1/-1/+12/-12 flavors for it.

Value increments would be Effect Values, right? I have those added to Paketti, too. and a Pattern Effect Cheatsheet dialog which lets you press a button to input effect to SelectionInPattern or row, and drag a slider to input effect values to SelectionInPattern or row.

I've also got shortcuts for +1/-1/+10/-10 Delay Column Value for SelectionInPattern or row. - same for Panning and Volume Columns too.

And Midi Mapping flavors for those, too. And specific Effect Column shortcuts too for specific effects ( .GIF image showing Effect Column Value Shortcuts

)

btw, could you mention which tracker clears the selection when cursor is moved? i could have a look and see if it can be somehow replicated.

i've actually recreated the Impulse Tracker shortcut ALT-U (well, CMD-U for macOS) for "Unmark Selection" - which i use whenever de-selecting. also ALT-D for doubleselect. (and ALT-L for select current track, second press selects the whole song)

Nice stuff!

OpenMPT, Famitracker and Furnace Tracker clear the selection when the cursor is moved without holding SHIFT. Also in them, clicking a cell mearly moves the cursor instead of creating a new selection. Think of it this way, in these tools the cursor itself is the selection.

In Renoise, I use the "value_stepper" tool to transpose and change column values.

Checkout this recent thread about tracker features people like: https://battleofthebits.com/academy/GroupThread/39219/what%27s+a+really+specific+tracker+feature+that+you+wish+more+%28or+all%29+trackers+had/

- I'm still not sure how I'm supposed to input a full effect command without setting the edit step to 0 and manually moving the cursor horizontally. I really like the way Furnace does it.

- I have to export a sample to .wav to load it into a convolver via the file picker. Would be much better if I could drag & drop from inside Renoise to the convolver.

- I would like more flexible routing like Reaper. I like to group instruments with their send effects in a "folder". Right now I have to work around that by structuring stuff like:

DRY SEND -> GROUP SEND
EFFECT SEND -> GROUP SEND

- Lengthening a sample is annoying. I work around this by using the resample function or resampling from an audio loopback, but it's not fast.

The fact that it exists

about painpoints: everything, starting from its terrible gui... (or at least, lack of themes that could help its usage becoming a bit less painful) (edit: seems im not alone: https://forum.renoise.com/t/wtf-font-size-with-2560x1440-and-4k-eye-cancer/47984/4 - and nothing changed since 7 years ago!... shameful issue for a paid proprietary software imho... deflemask style...)

when submitting a renoise entry, what i use to do is editing almost everything on openmpt (or milkytracker), and then importing the xm file from renoise only for saving the xrns file (edit: i only can find these menu items and etc by guessing, i cant read them at all... :'( )

eskur, iirc if you hold shift while typing an effect command, you can just type it out in full without moving the cursor or swapping edit step around

@Eskur! i've written a script that lets you Export the IR from Convolver, and also Import an IR (really, selected sample), to Convolver. so this solves the whole "having to click on the Load button and navigate around" issue. it was Jonas the PlugExpert who requested it, and i got it working with some base64 encoding help by another guy. It's pretty neat! This means you can take an IR you have in Convolver, and modify it beyond recognition, and then load it back in without issues.

Also, really glad you mentioned it!

For the "Full effect command", i've set up a special "Edit Mode switcher", that detects you're in the effect column, and sets the editstep to 0, and when you disable the editmode, it jumps back to the editstep you were at before running the script.

@WobbleBlast that forum thread was magical! i have bunches of those already in Paketti (my tool for Renoise) and will keep studying it. That was a great thread!!

instrument dsps being weaker than track dsps

@ordinate there's a workaround for that, you can combine track dsp's into a doofer and load that as an instrument dsp

I love renoise but the efficiency of openmpt is unbeatable imho. 3 functions I really miss in renoise are the paste flood, the amplify selection and the possibility to change instrument of selection with a single shortcut. I know there are tools for these but it's not the same as MPT.

I agree with others, the selection tool in renoise is really distracting. I hope to get used to it.

nitrofurano: Prefs -> GUI -> User Interface Scaling. has existed for at least 6 years. has multiple settings, steps of 25% from 100% up to 350%. UI is built to actually scale gracefully, it's not just doing an upscale and bilinear filtering or whatever. There's also a fairly complex theming system, which has a number of very usable themes, it's just that UI and text size isn't part of themes because trying out a theme shouldn't mean you have to get a new pair of eyes to turn the theme off.

preferences window is under the Edit menu.

for me: I wish channel collapsing could be selective to the tracker edit view, OR oscilloscope, OR mix view, not needing to be all 3 at once. hiding (for visibility editing others) and reshowing (to access effects and volume controls) tracks on full-album modules gets annoying since I have to do it constantly if more than one song is in-progress writing-wise, and different songs will often have their own versions of certain channels that have different mixing.

That, or the ability to set hide groups that I can switch between with a channel command/automation switch. Which, funnily enough, would also be amazing for tracker animation, but yknow I care about it more for practical reasons and not cool ones.

wish i knew how to route midi/notes into the autotune vst

afaik you can't route MIDI out of renoise - that includes routing it "into" plugins :(

you can route MIDI out of renoise, there's an entire screen just for controlling renoise midi in/out mapping.

however, sending midi info to effect VSTs is difficult. you're not gonna be able to do it on windows but you can do it in JACK using Carla. I wish that were built-in.