No media for Renoise or any trackers in the market?

Hi Renoisers,

I am feeling a little alone in the market when I search Amazon or Groove3 or Linda or any other resource whatsoever apart from Youtube - I am unable to find any historical, anthropological and instructional media - whether its a book or a video on either trackers or the best of them - Renoise.

Comparatively :

And when I search the biggest library in the world :

Groove 3 has nothing Renoise, same for Udemy same for Lynda and others.

Like what is going on? Are we going to just let the legacy of Trackers and the demoscene and the 20+ years of festivals and history etc just whittle away un-authored? Or are we happy with a Wikipedia article and homebrewn Youtube videos.

I have a suggestion : how about I try to get a book published specifically on Renoise combined with beatmaking and other tricks and tips as well as some important interviews and best representative artists and publish a book with one of the publishers that are sold on the book pitch.

How do you as a Renoiser and tracker musican feel about this ? Does everyone want such a tome published or are we happy till date in 2017, with not even a single book in the market about Renoise or tracking or music alternatives like it.?

I think I can get this done cos I have few publisher contacts. Maybe I will go on my own if no one is supportive of it.

The TOC might look like this :

INTRODUCTION TO TRACKING

RENOISE 101 (will contain various chapters on you know what)

TIPS AND TRICKS

POWER COMBO = RENOISE + BEATMAKING TOOLS

SCRIPTING: UNLEASH THE POWER USER IN YOU

INTERVIEWS

I assume it should be a 150 -200 page book max.

This will be a milestone since as far as I can see (I mean ‘eye can see’), it will be the first and only ‘proper’ book in the market.

Even FLStudio and for God’s sake even LMMS has a book. Why the heck is the Renoise ‘community’ so passive about this? Please share your thoughts or flames.

2 Likes

@encryptedmind: It is a very good initiative for the whole English reader.I am Spanish, so it is a matter a little far away.However, before making the book, it is highly advisable that the main author knows as the palm of the hand all Renoise and your history and situation, and also Redux, otherwise it will not be a good work.

The community is not passive. It is rather that this product has no advertising.Is a niche product with sporadic updates and with long periods without activity by its main creator.There are not also companies interested in marketing their products supporting this software, such as some USB drivers for DAW of well-known brands.

For my part I think you shouldwait for Taktik to return and should contact him, because it’s not your product. Until then I would not start with this initiative…

Many of these books are aimed at profit, business, not contributing anything for love to the art.

If you are willing to make such a sacrifice, you must make sure to be true to reality.I wish you a lot of encouragement with this issue.

Renoise forever!!! :drummer: :drummer: :drummer: :drummer:

3 Likes

I’ve had a turn as a professional technical writer.

It is hard to do it well.

The money is very iffy.

I made some good cash off my first book. I later realized I was lucky; it was one of the few in the market (and at least my half of the book was good : ) )

It took a lot of work (and writing comes fairly naturally to me).

Later writing was not so successful.

To anyone considering this: If you are confident you can produce a high-quality, and highly accurate, instructional book about Renoise, go for it.

If you put in the work and do it well you will likely never got proper compensation for your efforts.

If there was a market for Renoise books then someone at some product factory would have found someone to write it. (I’m more familiar with books about programming; as soon as any topic gets even remotely popular there is a rash of poorly-written books generated. I expect it is the same with music software.)

This may be a chicken/egg problem, and maybe if a good Renoise book existed then it would feed into greater Renoise use. I’m skeptical of that.

To anyone still considering this: Give some thought to a small, Kindle-style ebook (epub/mobi/pdf combo pack) self-published. Keep it short, and sell it cheap. Give it a hook: focus on creating game software, or making and selling beats, or something other than “Learn this software you’ve never heard of”.

Market the book by exploiting an association with something already popular. : )

Factor in the cost having to pay a real copy editor to fix your mistakes.

Keep it under 100 pages. Sell for under US $2

That Renoise is not updated often is, in this case, a plus; the book should stay relevant for a while.

1 Like

The youtube tutorials are excellent. Everything is explained clearly.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB7op_Ds1S5zE3Jk6EgK31qVfhaa76YkW

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB7op_Ds1S5xvpUcsGV9KxtjhGuzybuz8

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB7op_Ds1S5xEMhpRek2ULsmRb1vYEZxg

1 Like

@raul, Thank you so much for your encouragement and very good points. Well I know from experience that writing is a huge task and committment so definitely it will require all your support. Also writing a book is more than just knowing a tool, its also about having the writing ability to get the message accross. I certainly appreciate the fact that an very longtime member or ‘guru’ is in theory the best author for an authoritative tome. But he might or might not be ready for instruction, or have the writing skills (unless he has done books/articles before) of that scale or commit time to this project and see it through the end. In fact, I can think of myself as a sort of journalist who can research the topic, study the timeline and convey the message clearly aimed at the mass audience. So it is mandatory that I understand what Renoise is and how it works, that is what a regular user would do anyways. However, its certainly best if Taktik himself contributes with interesting parts about its history and origins and the general direction of how this book should look in the end.

I am not in for the profit (some book royalties is expected in exchange for the time I spend writing the drafts, that is always part of the deal with any book publisher, usually a small amount, no way gonna get rich of it or anything), but its mainly so that I can get to contribute to the scene while pushing this software to the masses so that next time someone searches Amazon, he/she gets a valid hit and that is my main goal.

I am not sure about this particular statement what you mean, maybe you can rephrase it?

“However, before making the book, it is highly advisable that the main author knows as the palm of the hand all Renoise and your history and situation, and also Redux. But it will not be a good work.”

Renoise has such a rich feature set and history as well, so much time has passed that indeed some amount of responsibilty has to be taken for the final content. But even if its a start - an empty Amazon page is not the solution, something needs to be done and it must not take too much time(as in delay, not the project time :)).

The youtube tutorials are excellent. Everything is explained clearly.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB7op_Ds1S5zE3Jk6EgK31qVfhaa76YkW

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB7op_Ds1S5xvpUcsGV9KxtjhGuzybuz8

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB7op_Ds1S5xEMhpRek2ULsmRb1vYEZxg

Ya well, I know of course :slight_smile: But where is the official Renoise Book.

No Starch Press might be interested if they see an audience for it and that is the reason I am doing some offline research on this. There are just a couple of academic looking papers on Tracker software - the Radium tracker and a couple others. But that is for their own software tool projects. A lot of similar tools come up in the security scene as well. Till date very few books are written except for the most well used ones like IDA Pro where Chris Eagle has done a great job of presenting the essential concepts. No Starch releases books for geeks and I believe they just might be interested in a book that delves in tracker history and the most updated one currently. The complaints about not being updated etc are not really that warranted, if its a functional and selling software, what is the harm in putting out literature for that. In fact it ensures some amount of stability for the readers for reference.

Also being disjointed :

  1. New user downloads Renoise

  2. Visit online menu and first time sees it as a dry manual

  3. Searches Youtube for vids

  4. Finds some Renoise team made vids and concludes from the number of subs and views, “oh well maybe not too popular just yet”.

  5. Searches Google “Renoise tutorials” | “Renoise book” | “Renoise course”

  6. Finds essentially nothing cohesive, but a lot of blogs and posts here and there.

  7. Encounters the Renoise Forum, and then finds this really intimidating :slight_smile: Spends time reading posts and replies.

  8. Spends more time with Renoise and over time gets comfortable

  9. Sees that no one develops courseware even for free, just tips and tricks posted as replies and BBS board style.

  10. User who uses Logic/Protools sees lots of course and books on Logic etc and leaves Renoise for that or stays behind thinking “well that’s all I suppose”.

It could be a free book also, I don’t mind the fact that someone else can take over the GNU Project version of it. But there is something special in making it commercial. Renoise itself is not GPL, and most definitely will not be found in Amazon with an ISBN number. If I can take helm of this particular project then why not? I mean I have the writing experience and definitely comfortable with the tech or theory part. For the more involved bits like scripting, I can take expert advice and even let co-authors compose chapters. This can be a group project where the benefits are split from the outset.

For a video course that can scale well and reach a pro audience I think Groove3 is the best choice. I feel they will be interested if we approach them with this option. I will contact Taktik about all this. I just hope he replies :slight_smile:

I think the video tutorials out now are very good. However, they have to be searched for first.

The hidden strength of Renoise is in the arranging of electronic music. The number one problem people have is completing a song. The way songs are arranged in Renoise via the pattern matrix gives a person, especially someone who has “failed” with traditional DAWS, the best opportunity to actually finish something. At the most rudimentary, a person can create a loop and then visually build it up and break it down using the pattern matrix to create a song. If a book was called something such as “Finish Your Track…Finally! With Renoise” and you focused on how to “arrange a mix” I think it would sell.

The other advantage would be that the slower pace of updates means you only have to do one book so you could get a long tail effect on your efforts.

The trick is using the book to market the program as solving a common problem.

@neurogami : Very relevant points and very true for the bulk of technical writing work. Its a LOT of hard work certainly. I have a positive experience with my previous proper book and it became a market success and I get emails and messages from IT folk literally around the globe about how it gave them insight about the subject matter. I also have made enough cash (aka royalty checks) from its sales that have warranted my actual efforts in writing it. Not to mention the whole experience of seeing the book though and working with a global publisher. Totally worth it in my opinion and I still had a user base in that sense, also the balls to tackle a topic that even many senior analysts would not want to, in the risk of looking stupid or sharing trade secrets (security scene is very elitistor lack of time or writing chops/infact a couple of poorly written books came out the same time as mine and it bombed precisely because of the writing and presentation : this is serious business), but it payed off big time for me and its a highlight in my resume as well. I am very proud of it and thanks to the publisher who guided me the whole time. On the other hand the security scene can be extremely unforgiving with so called charlatans and poor quality work or plagiarised work and there are entire websites dedicated to exposing this sort of thing, they will expose you and rip you apart. The damage if I was insincere to my career would be great if I made any false step. Thankfully, nothing backfired and I made it through without a scratch. It can be very unnerving. Compared to that, writing a book about using Renoise will be at most a lukewarm hit or a very narrow miss, which will only aid me in doing even more esoteric works. Sales are the last thing I am thinking about with this project. Also I am pretty sure no one will dis me to death if I really do make a mis-step anywhere and I can be forgiven for my sins in these forums :slight_smile:

Regarding getting a book out for Renoise, I agree that with all this time around more than a decade, if someone really had to do it, it would have already been done by now. I also feel that there is definitely an internal hierarchy of sorts in order to gain permission for various things which it totally expected, but if its elitism or nicheness that is in favour of actually making Renoise accessible to people outside the scene then you are dooming Renoise to be forever a cult of sorts. New users outside the scene would not know or expect to know anyone from the scene and they wont take to this attitude if they think they have to invest 15 years and then feel that they actually can make music out of Renoise. I think if we present Renoise as a self contained solution to expedited music making and not to mention the fun with it, @gremlin makes an nice point, if it solves problems it should certainly address an audience. Now whether the book should be done a recipe style or whether a little unconventional but highly informative for the new renoiser (is what my focus is), will take some initial research. In time everyone will be a power user, and in fact I already get what I want from Renoise, so this is not a book for US (since we already appreciate it), its a first step in making Renoise available for everyone else, and that IS my long term goal. I am very positive that a good amount of attention in the long run will result in converts in due time and possibly a LOT sooner than expected resulting in more Renoise sales and a bigger fan base, less niche and more conventional. I believe I would hate to have conventional in the same sentence, but this is bigger than all of us, in that sense. If the book succeeds for any reason, we already have a winner in our hands. And I obviously will give my heart and soul to it right from the diagrams to the text and tone of the tome, I should have very solid book by the end of the project timeline.

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I would love to see a book, not on Renoise specifically but the history of tracking. I think the whole Amiga MODS vs Atari MIDI thing is interesting and a discussion of the different tracking paradigms with examples of milestone programs like Protracker, Ft2, IT, ST3, Renoise, Radium etc would be cool. Whoever runs this bloghttp://trackerbase.blogspot.com.au/ has a pretty good collection of trackers and would be a good starting point.

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I’d be surprised if there isn’t one already, in a language other than English.

@encryptedmind: It is a very good initiative for the whole English reader.I am Spanish, so it is a matter a little far away.However, before making the book, it is highly advisable that the main author knows as the palm of the hand all Renoise and your history and situation, and also Redux, otherwise it will not be a good work.

I hope it is more understandable…

Do not forget to talk extensively about the Renoise Community and these forums. There’s a lot of selfless work going on here (help, experience, videos, tools, songs …), and if Renoise is big in some sense, it’s not because of the software itself, but because of the people in these forums. If you have not yet attained this feeling, you are not yet ready to write this book.Here are admirable people, and also people who come and go, and you will have to know why.And there is a lot of information “hidden” in these forums.

I think you should do a lot of research, contrast, and talk to a lot of people who know and use Renoise before tackling such a project.Be very patient with the accumulation of data.And somehow it will be necessary to be impartial as far as possible.It should not be a “personal” book of what you think is Renoise and what is around.Here you will have a challenge.

It is also advisable to learn LUA, the Renoise API and make tools. Then you have a different idea of what Renoise is.Without doing this step, it is as if you only used half Renoise.

Will the book only be text or with illustrative images?Will it only be available in paper or also in some digital format that can be translated with a translator?

If other books from other DAWs have a lot of sales, it is possibly due to the large amount of DAW sales, because it is well known, famed. With Renoise you have no such thing. If you expect a large mass of people to read your book, you will have to do more than write it. That is, advertising of reach.

But it is very easy to talk about what you can do or not. How to focus. The difficult thing is to do it. So encouragement! It will be necessary to write many more paragraphs, well ordered and measured.

Keep going. the illusion is perceived in you, and that’s agreeable…

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…

Groove 3 has nothing Renoise, same for Udemy same for Lynda and others.

Like what is going on?

…

https://forum.renoise.com/t/learn-renoise-from-the-ground-up/47872

Price: 00’00 €

How do you as a Renoiser and tracker musican feel about this ? Does everyone want such a tome published or are we happy till date in 2017, with not even a single book in the market about Renoise or tracking or music alternatives like it.?

Does your choice to write a book really depend on our opinion? Do it anyway! I also thought about a project like that … in German language, and I started yesterday :wink:

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@noisetoys : Thank you for your positivity and encouragement :slight_smile: I could get the versions translated in German I suppose (let me talk to the publisher first!).

@raul : "

I think you should do a lot of research, contrast, and talk to a lot of people who know and use Renoise before tackling such a project.Be very patient with the accumulation of data.And somehow it will be necessary to be impartial as far as possible.It should not be a “personal” book of what you think is Renoise and what is around.Here you will have a challenge.

It is also advisable to learn LUA, the Renoise API and make tools. Then you have a different idea of what Renoise is.Without doing this step, it is as if you only used half Renoise.

"

I know where its going :slight_smile: You see I can invest the next 5 years in becoming a ‘big mastah member’ or something (would love it!) and THEN write the book, putting in all the forum knowledge and all the tools I wrote in Lua etc. and think I did a fantastic job and sell just one damn copy. That would be a great proposition and I am looking forward to using Renoise the rest of my life, BUT not at the expense of losing time in the process. Hear me out, if I go that route, then honestly what is different about me THEN and all of you guys who have already invested a decade to this community? If so then why has not even one publication come out? Or at least a pro video series. You see a number of homebrewn Youtube videos, while having passion and energy, the presentation is left wanting in my opinion, and its not like they have even spent 1 year with the tools or something - composing_gloves videos which you sent in the link, I think he is terrific at explaining something, but his approach is very wishy-washy, neither the demos sound good as in musically nor did I find those too engaging - I mean the way he say “what is this D00 command and all this hex stuff, I had to get my head around it etc…” it just sounds very off to me. Watch any well produced video and you will see what I mean. In fact I like Andrew Schellman’s Macshine series and how he uses it and the way he explains it on video. Its not like either NI sponsored him, not its like he is looking to work for NI or anything like that. But while knowledge is being made and preserved and intercommunicated, disseminating it is not your strong suite, that is for real.

Renoise is not about using each and every feature, neither I plan to make it an encyclopedia of under the hood circuit bending and hidden god mode functionality. For those kinds of ‘authoritative’ tomes, I think you guys can do that for yourselves since I actually have a different vision for this book. Just like many others I have my own tastes and tools and techniques that are unique to my genres of choice, also many other things I plan to include in the book that include music theory and history etc. From my own experience a LOT many electronic guys are very weak in music theory, sight reading or genuine instrumental skills (not LaunchPad). For Renoise I see a diversity - lots of talented coders, musicians, plugins devs etc. so that is obviously something I want to share with everyone. I honestly feel Renoise is the most simple of DAWs out there and I want to sell that feeling to new comers. I specialize in reverse engineering so if I spent a 6 months time in Lua I am more than sure I will churn out my share of stuff, also maybe hack into the Renoise binary and patch some functions in place etc…trust me on this one - no new user would bother to even open Renoise in debug mode.

In fact the Renoise community can come out with RENOISE: RENNAISSANCE CHRONICLES-THE COMPLETE VERSION on your own time cos for now, we guys don’t even have 1 single publication on the market. Also look at from the other side : Beatmaking is taking the world by storm, not Lua programming. Most guys who make beats now are using FLStudio or regular Logic Cubase in addition to hardware like MPC and Maschine. I plan to combine this niche with the popular demand (not short term, beatmaking is a huge topic with its own kind of history). There are not many books that are doing what I plan to do. No book for Renoise, very few books on sampling and beatmaking(written by you guessed it Black American producers, cos they own it I suppose!) - how many books that do both. My answer is NONE. Lua programming books, many, VST dev a couple (Will Pirkle, good stuff and deeeep), CSound etc (Richard Boulanger, really good stuff for C programming), books by Gareth Loy (detailed digitial audio and physics) not related to Renoise cos that works everywhere. Think about this - Beatmaking, Tracking, Sampling, Music theory, History and commentary, production techniques and a daily audio production recipe list and lots of other cool stuff as the meat of the book. I do not even see a competition and judging by the quality of time I will put in, it should pan to a very wide audience as you might imagine.

So yes, I might not be very popular after I get it done out here, but on the bright side, the popularity of Renoise will take its first proper publication step. That is all I care about - and life is short man, I ain’t got time to be master specialist of 20,000 things before I get ONE piece of output done. I already am a professional (I never say that btw :)) in what I do for a living and as far as I can see, I have not found any plugin of that much use besides some genuinely useful tools like the slicer(now integrated in the sampler) and rubberband, and very useful f_ind and replace_ from very talented devs that are basically expected features that have been in hardware and software for ages. MPC has sampling and timestretching and per sample layers etc…so I am not too keen about getting in so deep, so fast and for so long. Quick and dirty but wide also has a very strong place. Also Renoise is kinda slow in terms of development - the worst thing that I can imagine after 5 years is that by then my mind becomes like everyone else and I procrastinate even further, damn easy trust me on this one.

In the cracking scene or white hat security scene, people share code on a daily basis, tools are developed, annotated, inventoried and distributed as AIOs, plugins made etc. There are multiple conferences and bodies that deal with the standards that we work on like the IEEE, we have BlackHat, Defcon and just like that the Demoscene has its own share of festivals. One of my friends runs Malcon in India, India’s largest security conference where I used to do the behind the scenes admin work earlier at its inception before I branched out to consult on my own. I can understand the spririt and protective idea behind all this, and research I will of course do as due diligence. But whether I see it as my way to do things or his/her way is upto me really. Depending on the tone and instructional style of the book, I will have to adjust accordingly. It must be very inviting and entertaining to the user. That is my first priority.

Secondly, I understand ackowledgements and that will be included for sure, don’t worry about all that. But I don’t see any one handing out certifications about how to use Renoise. In fact at my current ‘knowledge level’ I am more than happy to do without extra plugins and just make use of the ‘vanilla’ Renoise features and I suppose I get 99% of what I want the way I want. That is the beauty of this tool anyways so until I see a university like +RHU (Renoise Hacking University) I dont really have an incentive, many others made masterpieces with less. (I used the +Orc handle format for those who remember what it means :slight_smile: long live 1997)

One thing I can say for sure - I am not going to make amateur instruction videos or post casually written blogs about something I care about - to each his own. I have my own take on things and I can deliver a professional product and it will help open a lot of doors for everyone involved.

Renoise is a German piece of high art (I love Germans, my first gf was German, also I travelled extensively in Germany). I suppose Goethe would talk the following if he ever got his hands on Renoise (sadly never happened, though he certainly had the chops to possibly write a Booker prize winning book on Renoise that also illuminates the deep nature of man and its purpose!!)

All my life I have been known as the guy with balls (yeah funny I know, but my closer friends know better :)), not to mention lazy as hell… Personally I really love Goethe’s line :All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.

Goethe quotations:

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

Correction does much, but encouragement does more.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

Nothing is worth more than this day.

Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen.

I love those who yearn for the impossible.

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.

2 Likes

I would love to see a book, not on Renoise specifically but the history of tracking. I think the whole Amiga MODS vs Atari MIDI thing is interesting and a discussion of the different tracking paradigms with examples of milestone programs like Protracker, Ft2, IT, ST3, Renoise, Radium etc would be cool. Whoever runs this bloghttp://trackerbase.blogspot.com.au/ has a pretty good collection of trackers and would be a good starting point.

Very nice @skyscape. Thank you for the link and your points on what you would like to have included in the contents. End of the day, it WILL be a community effort.

To others who are viewing this post of any interest: Please contribute your ideas and things you would like to read or have it etched in paperback/kindle.

Make sure you dont get wishy washy and stuff when you write your renaissance book yo.

Make sure you dont get wishy washy and stuff when you write your renaissance book yo.

Ha ha, thanks bro. I edited some parts of the last post. I don’t have a wishy washy style :0 I never meant it to denigrate the new passion, but communication skills are another thing entirely, I can babble on the mic as well, for real. Lets try to see how things are done in the bizness :slight_smile: Publishers make more note of tone and style than content: trust me on this one, the packaging, audience, hype generated and presentation all matter more than the initial layout. Strict editing will take place, grammer checks, proofreading and after that, a second round of reviews etc… if you never done it, you would think its HELL.

But fun as HELL too!!

@encryptedmid

Use your time as you wish, of course. But for everything I told you, you do not need to spend 5 years. You, who seem to know what you want, just make it happen.

In short, what is not appropriate is that anyone who wants to write a book that serves other people to know a product “X”, the writer write very long paragraphs like a crazy. Calm. Before, it is appropriate to know well the product “X” and everything that is around, and that is not done in a week.By the way, many people here are not 10 years in the forums. As I said, people come and go continuously.

And just another detail. Many amateur people contribute what they want unselfishly, without waiting for anyone to criticize it for not being professional.Making video tutorials is not easy, any result deserves respect.

Cheer up and do not worry so much.Do not expect anyone’s approval of your idea.Just do it, but do it well so that after finishing you feel proud.And that means taking the right path. For the moment, the first is to talk to Taktik, since it is their product. I suppose you’ll have to ask permission to do such a thing. This is not the same as writing a review on a digital music website.

Why have not people made videotutorials or books pro?Maybe they are happy simply by using and enjoying Renoise and have the knowledge they need.Having a book like this is like finding an advertising brochure on your home portal. You may want to read it or not.I find it more interesting to learn more things to create more complex tools.Every person is a world, think differently.

I would love to see a book, not on Renoise specifically but the history of tracking. I think the whole Amiga MODS vs Atari MIDI thing is interesting and a discussion of the different tracking paradigms with examples of milestone programs like Protracker, Ft2, IT, ST3, Renoise, Radium etc would be cool. Whoever runs this bloghttp://trackerbase.blogspot.com.au/ has a pretty good collection of trackers and would be a good starting point.

In these forums there is something published that shows the chronology of most trackers to date. It was a very big and interesting tree:

http://helllabs.org/tracker-history/trackers.svg

There are people who use time extensively to investigate.

@raul: Ya I got that scalable vector image from the link sent by @skyscape already. Nice job on that and it can be built upon or redited for the page size for paperback. It’s all good, I will read the forums inside out and every other paper and resource before I put anything to ink, except for the notes part.