Standalone Xrns Player Library

The thread The Musicdisk got me thinking.

Renoise-based music “compresses” very well in many circumstances, especially electronic music (common today). It is possible to make a ten minute song that’s less than 100kb. (Seriously, there is so much music today that is loop-based, you could compress most music nicely just by recognising sequence repetitions and storing differences from that basic ‘throb’ as another layer, then analysing that for repetitions and so forth… naturally, each “layer” becomes a looped instrument.) As already stated in the Musicdisk thread, the potential for dynamic music, and indeed realtime DSP over any audio source, is staggering. The Renoise playback engine is a realtime Swiss army knife.

It has good potential as a standard internet music format: for MIDI, for samples, with effects, the works… with just a few simple additions.

  • Embed highly compressed (probably MP3) samples;
  • Make the format streamable (by loading instruments just before they’re used, like how Flash loads symbols);
  • Accept equations or some sort of language as DSP plugins (so any new effects remain cross-platform).

With these in place, XRNS music would be lightweight, portable, and suitable for use as a common internet file format.

Possibility: license the current Renoise player engine to Adobe, who could in turn incorporate it into the next Flash sound engine. This would be the only commercial licence you would ever have to issue. XRNS would then become playable on 80% of computers worldwide, literally overnight.

The hard part is getting a big licensee who won’t want exclusive rights to all of Renoise. From what I gather, big tech companies swallow whole anything that moves in their general direction.

This topic has uncomfortably large implications :)

actually, with xrns files of over 50 mb for 5 minute tracks…
also taking into account that one would need all external plugins used…
… and the amount of people actually sharing their xrns files…

I don’t see this happen… sourcefile tracking scene is as good as dead, alas…

A player only if released would probably never support VST plugins.

And for the use of 100KB or less sized songs, Impulse Tracker or FastTracker is still the better alternative.

Download DosBox and use those in there.

Why? A player would “just” be “Renoise minus a whole lot of stuff”. But that would probably require too ugly an #ifdef mess to be worth it :lol:

The only SDK/player/whatever that would get my vote would be something that gets updated automatically whenever Renoise gets updated. Of course it’s silly of me to speak without knowing anything about how Renoise works internally, but say you have this project with all the source files - the SDK would be a second project with a relatively slim main() (or rather .dll/.so stuff) that references the required sources and headers of the actual Renoise project. If it’s feasible to do that mind that it’s often better to do such stuff sooner than later…

EXCUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSE ME!! :lol:

I’m not even going to speak about the user interface, but also the internal fx… NO comparison!

I’m gonna cover the issues:

Tracks too big
With MP3 sample embedding, 50mb tracks would become 5-10mb tracks. So, essentially, you have an MP3 filesize with far superior versatility.

But wait, if you actually try to get filesize down using actual effort

My instrumentals rarely get to 10mb… even after I render “warezed” riffs to sample :) With vocals I can understand pushing 50mb, but a bit of smart size-crunching technique (e.g. clip your samples’ edges properly, why is there sample data after the loop, vocals have lots of gateable noise, so just gate the frickin noise out etc.) I’m sure you can get the size down.

So if you push 10mb bang you’re down to 1mb with mp3 encoding WOOHOO

External Plugins
External plugins = source code is in the XRNS. DLLs would be ignored by the portable player, it would only use internals and the “code” DSPs.

Nobody shares?
The amount of people sharing XRNS files would jack up insanely ( a ) if the filesizes weren’t f****ing ridiculous and ( b ) if they would be sure no plugs would be missing.

Sourcefile tracking will make a comeback IF we bring back these attributes (small, portable) which the old MODs had.

Or, throw caution to the wind and save those VST DLLs inside the bloody XRNS HAHAHAHA :yeah: well, the freeware dudes won’t really mind I suppose :D

I can add my licensed copies of Symphonic Orchestra and include the whole 15GB of samplelibraries that come with it, but i doubt it will play on any other machine than mine.
Forget this option.

Somehow I doubt that all 15GB are used in a given song (and further, that they are compressed at all). But I can see obtaining exactly the files that are used would be a problem…

Workaround: render segments of columns which use VSTi’s to sample, factor out repetitions (with minor variations as a “difference layer” i.e. adding a new column which plays a new “differences-only” part over the repetitive segment), then MP3 compress them.

Oh dear, what have I done?? :D

Well freeze track would render the track as a digital audio and store it somewhere. OGG freezing would actually make sense.l

The best argument against this is “it’s not worth the development time”.
There’s just no way to justify it.

word, to much hassle for the little interest.

50 Mb or 50 Kb - it’s all about author’s objective. It’s possible to create a cool tune in 50 kb, it’s also possible to create a crap in 50 mb. So, why not to give an ability to create small (and executable) tunes for the people who can do it? No worry about others who can not - they already have all they need.

i say

make an opensource AI to track nonfree vsts synthesis & routines thus creating a free version based on this open source AI’s ability of hyper-intuitive-reverse-engineering-jediskills.

then we bundle all these great free unlicensed new vsts in with the tunes.

then we put the opensource AI to work combining our favorite great free unlicensed new vsts. together. then after that, we combine them altogether into 1 utopian vst. like the borg. then by that time we will probably have multiple multiple cortical input ports ie. sny playsinsation, nntndo riiality, mcrsft brwn node, phillips MindDicr, GE headstrog, Goog7, Dell XpeerEnce.
but no one will be able to afford em! :D

The only usage for a Renoise-Player would be to rip samples/tracks IMHO. Every XRNS with highQ-Samples is way bigger than a MP3 or OGG and I guess you even would lose some soundquality because some people remaster their tracks in Audacity or Wavelab before encoding them to mp3.

+1 against that. But ++1 for a better midi-life-input. I still have some problems with entering notes life. There has to be more quantisation.

I could see a possible market for games or websites using interactive music, if it also was possible to for programmers to control stuff like looping patterns and volumes mainly… But even more control, like effect knob movement etc would make it even more versatile of course.

Agree. I’d wish to have such a standalone player lib. I can imagine that it does require some work though. It’s not only ignoring the vst-code but also the UI and the whole midi- and keyboard-input as for ASIO support, lineIn-dsp, render-to-sample, sample-editor code, etc…and then you guys surely want it for mac and Linux aswell. I don’t know if anyone is interested in ifdef-ing precious code he has written (vst-support for a lot of plugIns). But considering the work it requires I think this one would be a big favour. Maybe as a Christmas gift? :)
It’s just seems that Renoise is on another level than the scene trackers were/are.
Let’s face it. Except of MT2 and Sk@le the players have not been written by the tracker delevopers themselves.