Seems that I’ve started a brain storm in a glass of water 
First of all - I’m not saying that Renoise should stop being a tracker. I’m in love with trackers from the first sight of Protracker, but still in my opinion they have pros and cons. For me, what is best in trackers is the way of editing and visualisation of notes. On the other hand the idea of fixed length patterns seems rather outdated to me in terms of flexibility and ease of creating the song structure (now, when I’ve tried arranger based environments). Thinking in patterns has most of the time subconsciously made me create short, repetitive phrases instead of longer entities and that’s where thinking in clips works better. You can record a two quarter-note long drum phrase and loop it throughout the song just as easy as record a whole-song-long solo. When thinking in clips you reuse and repeat what really needs it while copy-pasting patterns makes you reuse groups of note sequences at the same time thus in a way enforcing you to make repetitve music.
Now, as the arranger concept has appeared as the idea of future development of Renoise, I think it might be a good opportunity to drop the idea of a fixed length pattern. Editing clips the tracker way, arranging them using drag&drop techniques and then editing the whole song the tracker way seems to me as the fastest and least creativity-limiting way of music production. Neddless to say, this would still involve a pattern editor as a way of viewing the song data, tracker style and feel, scrolling, with multiple columns and marked clips. Only the song would not be divided into patterns - there would be a single timeline throughout the song. (If only I had time to make a nice screenshot of it…)
Martinal, you asked me what would be particularly inconvenient for Renoise users when using a classic pattern editor and the arranger - well probably nothing as long as they’ll use just one or the other. But as soon as they would like to use both at the same time, the situation might get messy. I consider myself an experienced user, but from the description of how the two are to work together I don’t think it will be intuitive to use. I can hardly say what will the actual inconveniences be, but an inner voice tells me that there will be an overhead of using both the arranger and the pattern editor at once - it might make you focus on the technical side more than the music. And that is the contrary of what I’d like to see in Renoise in the future, as for me Renoise is about creativity, about fast and easy putting my ideas into life. And not about keeping a particularly high FastTracker compliance & feel, even though I’d spent some years making those XMs.
Please don’t tell me ‘go look for another program’ - I’d not be a Renoise fan and a registered user if I’d found a program that would better suit my needs. It’s also what makes me concerned about the way Renoise looks in the future - and having an arranger is a brilliant idea, I just think we could take an even bigger step, even if it means changing the philosophy a bit.
And the true question is for Taktik and the Renoise developpers: are your registered users mostly old-skool trackers, appreciating FT2 similarity and creating VST(i)-free RNS songs or people who have started their music making with trackers, then moved to more powerful virtual studios to find Renoise in the end as the best around combination of power, quality and ease of use (but still knowing that some things are better solved elsewhere)? Having answered that question it will probably become clear whether any changes of the philosophy are a good idea or not.
One more question would be if you want people to use Renoise only for putting some tracks together, then rendering them to separate files to mix elsewhere or for the entire process from the idea to mastering. Renoise has the power to become a single application complete studio environment IMHO (and I’d love to live long enough to see that ), but the development process would have to be focused on the features important to the ‘pro’ customers and would involve making Renoise more like Logic and less like FT2, sad but true.
That is my point of view, but I’ll surely keep on using Renoise (nearly-) regardless of the development path you choose.
I know, I was supposed to be technical, sorry - but it’s a bit too early for me to be technical, if I don’t fully agree with the way you want the arranger implemented, isn’t it?
–P/\ULiE PHONiCK
I’ve followed this thread reading everything carefully and it’s very interesting… I thought this would be something I’d almost never use, and although the opposite is yet to be proven, I think this can be very useful for me and other oldschool hex hackers as well as those used to arrangers. It actually looks like you’ve invented an easy and seemless interface to the patterns. Much creds to you!
