I’m trying to get an overview of what can be done in terms of teaming renoise up with one of the classic (or new) audio programming environments. I’m on linux so I’m basically thinking SuperCollider, PD, csound or chuck.
I have been working with all four, mostly csound (years ago) and chuck (not so many years ago). After I discovered SuperCollider has a new crossplatform ide (scide), I’m starting learning SuperCollider again.
I did some unfinished, wonky “integration” between chuck and renoise last year, and also some in python. I also just found https://github.com/triss/sc-renoise.
But I’d like to get a complete overview of what’s outthere. What’s the status of various efforts, hands-on experiences, example usages, demo videos of peoples work and from the renoise devs: are there any plans for official work in this direction?
i rewire ableton+max and renoise. (works great on my mac.) the reason i got ableton is to handle long wav´s like vocals or long recordings of acoustic instruments. all the other stuff is still made in renoise.
as i´ve understood, ableton have to be master. so you got to route all you sounds to ableton. so if you reckon abbe sound diffuse or lame compared to renoise. then you won´t be in for a treat.
I’m currently working on a setup with custom made synthesizers in SuperCollider wired into Renoise using Jack (on Linux).
(The synthesis possibilities in SC are just awesome, similar to PD, but it comes with more useful primitives
built into SC directly. And once things start to get complex you are better off with SC, as you have more
possibilities of abstraction and automated “wire” generation.)
I also tried to use SC as effect unit for individual Renoise tracks, as you can read in this thread:
But this requires some attention to the latencies. It would be great if Renoise could do some latency
calculations for me in this case, but I guess I can manage for now.
I experimented around with PD a year ago, but I never really explored the possibilities of wiring it
into Renoise. Having a limited synthesizer supply on Linux kinda drove me to build them myself,
even though I got some external hardware units (which are not connected due to limited space in my living room).
It would be great if there was tighter integration with SC, in the form of choosing some input/output channels of
the scsynth server as “instrument” or “effect” and automated latency calculations/compensations.
There’s also an integrated solution in the form of lua. Don’t forget that you can manipulate note data and samples, allowing you to code generative processes to make sounds and note data. I made this little proof of concept a few years ago after learning a few basic lua API commands: https://soundcloud.com/rvxi/renoise-algorithmic but there’s a lot more you can do if you invest some time in it.
There are some reasonably powerful semi-modular VSTs such as uhe Ace or Bazille which are pretty powerful.
There’s Tassman which is a fully modular VST environment.
You could communicate with Pd, SuperCollider, ChucK, or Max over Jack.
You could ReWire with another app such as Reason or even Live (or Max, or Max+Live).
I have tried all the above but Pd + Renoise most extensively. I mostly had Renoise clocking Pd although the other way around has some advantages. At the time my intent was to use Renoise to create beats and trigger samples but use Pd for live processing and looping.
One advantage of Renoise is that everything handled internally is sample-accurate whereas any sort of intercommunication mechanism will add a small amount of latency.