March 31^st, 2013:
This project is no longer being maintained.

XRNS-PHP

XRNS-PHP is a collection of command-line scripts for Renoise, written in PHP.

These scripts are made for fun as a hobby, by people who don't get paid to do it. They are not officially supported by Renoise. If a script has bugs, we encourage you to fix them and share your patches.

Downloads are available on SourceForge. If you are impatient and adventurous you can grab the latest revisions from the SVN Repository. If you want to chat about these scripts, you can post in the Renoise Forums.

• Downloads & Development:
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/xrns-php/

Introduction

Renoise is a contemporary digital audio workstation (DAW) based upon the heritage and development of MOD tracker software. Its primary use is the composition of music using samples (in WAV, AIFF, FLAC, Ogg, MP3 format), VST/AU/LADSPA plug-ins, and MIDI sequencing of VSTi/AU soft synths. Renoise is multi-platform. It runs on Windows, MacOSX and Linux.

The mixer panel in Renoise adds a modern touch to the tracker heritage

Currently available XRNS-PHP scripts and utils:

• xrns-sf: XRNS Script Frontend, a graphical interface to any PHP script (for Windows)
• rndpack: generate a random sample pack by scanning directories
• xrns_delete_unused_tracks: Deletes tracks if there are no notes or commands
• xrns_merge: merges 2 XRNS modules
• xrns_ogg: compresses XRNS and XRNI with OGG VORBIS
• xrns_randomizer: randomizes XRNS modules
• xrns_sort_instruments: sorts instrument from biggest filesize to smallest

Deprecated:

• clip2code: converts pattern data to simple text
• SampleToSplit: Auto-magically maps xrni samples to the keys they belong to
• xml2mid: converts a MidiXML file to MIDI format
• xrns2midi: translates an XRNS module to MIDI format
• xrns_microtuner: Tune XRNI instruments using standard Scala tuning (*.tun) files
• xrns_reorganize_instruments_notes: reorganizes all notes in a song, so that each instrument will use a separate track.
• xrns_searchandreplace: replaces every occurrence of specific note in the song to another one

Usage

With the XRNS Script Frontend running the XRNS-PHP scripts is a breeze and usage speaks for itself.

If you are going the command-line way, usage is along the lines of:

         $ php -n <script_name>.php <args>
      

If you don't know the arguments to pass, just omit them to print some help. Or, open the PHP file in a text editor and read the comments for more info.

Technical background

Renoise outputs its data in XML format in several situations.

• The actual notes and effects are stored in an XML song file, wrapped in a zip archive, which is called an XRNS module
• Renoise's propriety XRNI instrument format uses XML to describe the instrument's properties
• Data from within Renoise such as notes and envelopes can be copied to the clipboard. Pasted in a text editor, you will see the XML representation of the data.

The XML data can be easily accessed, allowing anyone to manipulate the song without too much effort (eg. you don't have to reverse engineer the format). Our weapon of choice to manipulate the XML data is PHP. PHP scripts are commonly used as server-sided scripts, but it is also possible to run them from the command-line.

We have chosen to write scripts in PHP because of its ease, portability and popularity. It is not hard language, within a few weeks you should already be able to write fairly impressive stuff. We hope to motivate interested souls into picking up PHP and write new scripts for Renoise.

Few people appreciated having to installing a complete web server in order to use our tools. Also, the command-line method was not very popular with Windows users. To circumvent those problems, a frontend was developed that can be fed any PHP command-line script and displays it in an easy and pretty graphical interface.

Third party

• Info-Zip
• Oggenc
• FLAC

No warranty