Renoise Wiki Tutorial Pages | Renoise

You are here: Help » Renoise Tutorials » VST Effects

VST Effects

Disclaimer

Renoise developers cannot guarantee proper operation of every available third party VST effect or VST instrument. These products are not programmed by the Renoise Developers and programming methods used to compile these applications are not known to the Renoise developers. You are advised to download a demo-version of a VST effect or instrument to test within Renoise prior to purchasing a single-user license of this third party VST application.

Mac OS
PPC VST plugins are not Universal Binary (Intel) compilations of VST plugins. PPC plugins run on PPC Mac platforms only. Carefully check that you can download a Universal Binary of a VST plugin if you tend to purchase one for the Mac OSX and use it in Renoise.

There are a variety range of third party VST effects. Renoise does not come with it’s own set of VST effects. Though you can download a lot of commercial, shareware or freeware VST-effects around the net. Just scoop through google and you will encounter many sites hosting VST effects or VST instruments.

Each VST effect has it’s own set of effects and parameters. Usually, these parameters reside in it’s own proprietary editor, yet the method to reach them, should not be proprietary.

Setting up the proper VST plugin folder

First of all, if we haven’t configured Renoise yet to use VST instruments, it is important to know where to find them. This setting is found via the menu-bar, Edit → Preferences:

Under the Misc/VST tab, on the top-most side, you find the VST Directories panel where the VST-directories are set. Make one or both of them point to the folder where you have installed all your VST plugins. If you have them installed in several places, the best thing to do is get all DLL and related files (including their folder structure!) to those two root-folders and place them there. You don’t really have to *move* them, because you may encounter problems when uninstalling the devices from your system at a later time (for whatever reason you would do this). Browse that folder, and Renoise will automatically scan all your VST plugins for you (this includes VST Instruments and VST effects).

In the upper example, i have inserted a sonogram VST effect. As you can see, only a preset parameter is displayed in the panel. However, if you click the down-pointing arrow next to the “Open Editor” button, all made available VST parameters will be displayed in the panel.

Expanded parameter view of the panel

You can always use the VST’s own editor to set it’s parameters, this may not always work though. As said in the disclaimer, it is possible some VST effects or instruments do not work properly or work at all. Some even may crash Renoise during the scan for VST’s. VST editors or instruments that do not have their own built-in editor, will be replaced by Renoise’s alternative editor dialogue.

Alternative Renoise panel

Every VST has it’s own set of parameters. And unlike the Vsti Automate Device, VST can have more than 14 parameters and also more than 14 parameters can be automated. This is because you have no free choice of which parameter you want to affect through automation if you could only affect the first 14 parameters.

VST Effects

Setting up the proper VST plugin folder

Menu