While working on the Neurogami article about using Renoise to script Processing sketches via MIDI I found it somewhat tedious and error-prone to have enter specific MIDI values using the computer keyboard.
For example, a (legacy) Launchpad was used because the pad layout felt more intutive for certain commands. I wanted some of the effects to be added to the Renoise track. But where’s MIDI value 8 on the computer keyboard? Where is it on a standard MIDI keyboard?
I would have liked to just typed in “8” in the Renoise note editor but only text values (e.g. “F-3”) are allowed.
I first wrote a Ruby script to generate a chart showing the octaves and keys that map to specific note values and used the Renoise keyboard shortcuts to shift octaves. It worked OK but it’s still a bit tedious.
I was curious how hard it would be to write a custom Renoise tool to do this. Turns out, not hard at all.
The tools called “Raw MIDI” and it’s up on the Neurogami GitHub Renoise-stuff repo.
There are two things I wanted to add but could not; these may not be possible. The first was to set the input focus to the text field when the tool is opened. The other was to insert the note value when you hit the “Enter” key.
You have to manually click on the text field before entering the value. If you hit “Enter” twice the first one moves the focus off the text field and onto the “Insert” button, and the second will trigger the “Insert” button which enters the note.
It should then stay open unless you hit the “Close” button or the “Esc” key.
You do not have to turn on editing in order to use this. This will insert or change note values whether you’ve set the song to “edit” or not.