the piano roll in the latest versions of cubase is actually pretty good. of course, tracking will always be better because of the fast workflow and you dont need to keep scrolling up and down which gets annoying when using a piano roll. i’d say keep the pattern editor as it is and add a separate piano roll screen as well as an alternative which will make the transition to renoise easier on piano roll lovin’ peeps… coloured ‘blocks’ or ‘clips’ in the pattern editor would be sweet though in my opinion.
I’d like to see alternative suggestions from all these piano roll haters.
It’s not the piano roll most people here want, piano roll would just be a very familiar solution for many problems we have at the moment - bad sub tick editing, parts recorded with midi keyboard are very hard to edit while maintaining the “human touch”, visualizing the bigger picture and so on.
Don’t have anything against piano roll, nor I support the idea, but I wish we had a solution to problems described above.
What is the current development status of the piano roll?
Is it currently in active development?
Are we likely to see it in one of the future 2.x updates or will be in something bigger like Renoise 3?
no one knowes you gonna have to wait to see
I don’t get what piano roll exactly is, (I can’t load those images).
I think there is opposition between live&classic music makers and digital&progressive music makers.
Piano is old. It is true. 12 halftones in octave is also outdated approach.
Tracker’s grid system has its limitation that is true.
But piano has it also. It is true as well.
Keyboard of the PC is ugly. It is true.
You can’t press any combinations of keys you want and make PC recognize them.
Maximum from 3 to 5 keys simultaneously.
Why are you so bound to piano representation of sounds?
Try to use 144 notes in octave instead of poor 12 notes.
May be my thoughts have something in common with piano roll topic:
For those who haven’t read yet:
I do! Not only in HEX but in 64EX.
Notes, Instruments, Effects and parameters.
You know why? Because it is simpler and faster.
Actually it may be hex for computer.
When you are going through hell - just continue going. 
(enlightenment)
It is probably because pianist don’t know anything except piano with its 12 notes per octave.
?
Not true and has been discussed on this forum quite a few times. What you want is a full N=-Key Rollover keyboard (although pretty rare these days, not possible over USB, some old Cherry and IBM M Model keyboards were for example. Many gaming keyboards promise a minimum of 6-8 no matter what the combination. Saying that there are certain combinations of 3 that my laptop keyboard can’t even do.)
not being horrible BUT,
if you want a piano roll, why are you still using renoise? 
why start this old topic again??
This have been explained so many times here.
Anyway, I’m good with both piano rolls and trackers. I can work very fast with Renoise, Modplug Tracker, and FT2 back in the days, but I’m also very good with Cubase, Logic, Energy XT, and so on. I tend to learn keyboard shortcuts and always try to optimize my workflow, so this isn’t a subjective “well, that interface might be better for you” thing.
Basically, I know how and where both interfaces are optimal. Trackers are quite optimal for representing one kind of data, it works very well for rhythmic stuff, solos, polyphonic stuff where the different notes, lengths, and timing tend to have much to do with each other. It’s quick for inputting notes with the keyboard non-realtime and with its effect columns it provides a very nice way to change stuff like sample offsets and other effects. However, it’s really bad with non-quantized notes, representing complex piano parts with a lot of different notes of different note lengths (either they require way too many note columns, or the notes will be have to be randomly sorted into the columns where there’s space for the moment), multi-selections of notes (selections are rectangles in a tracker), or zooming.
The piano roll is less optimal for inputting notes at non-realtime, it works better if you can hit the record button and play something on your midi keyboard. It’s quite optimal to represent e.g. a complicated polyphonic piano solo that would only looks like a mess in a tracker with its delay commands and columns not connected to note pitch. The piano roll is better to alter that piano solo that you recorded, by e.g. letting the user make multi-selections and sweep the controller area to e.g. draw the note-on and note-off velocities of only the selected notes, or hit a keyboard shortcut to quantize, move, or resize the notes of the current multi-selection, especially in units smaller than one tracker row. You can quickly move around and zoom in and out with some ctrl/shift/alt+mouse wheel combo.
Just adding zooming to renoise patterns isn’t going to solve all this either, I know that it’s not subjective, I’m good enough with both to know their strenghts and weaknesses and for what kind of data I would like to use what kind of interface, and it would really be a dream come true to have both in one single program. I currently choise Renoise since I tend to compose on my laptop and don’t carry a midi-keyboard around all the time, and also because I currently don’t compose the type of music that uses complicated musical parts where note column count is a major problem. I always miss the other interface when I use one of them though.
well if it goes it, I don’t want it to jeapordize the tracker!!!
That’s not going to happen anyway to Renoise, the current users chose it because it is a tracker, and it would make absoltely no sense if the developers decided to disregard its entire userbase. If a piano roll is added, I’d never expect the developers to enforce it, so far they have practiced the approach to make new interface additions optional, such as the new (awesome) per-channel pattern sequencer.
If the devs decided to put in a piano roll, id find a use for it. Simple as. But its really not important for the kind of stuff i use Renoise for. I have to use ableton when im recording band stuff, guitars and vocals alike, but thats because it makes it easier programming Superior Drummer. But the waveform display in ableton is absolute dogshite. Compare it to Reaper(pc) and Logic on the Mac, it really is wank. Id use Reaper(pc) if it just wasnt just so buggy. Its so much cheaper than ableton too.
I really have felt that during my personal composition stages, renoise is what I work best with. I dont have a “set in stone music preference” that denotes what type of program you have to use to get a certain sound. And dont forget that a computer doesnt discriminate, a piano roll to the computer is the same as a tracker, its just how we, as humans,see it. (is that the guiness talking?), (and im not talking Alec). What id really like to see in Renoise ( and way more important) is a way to control nuclear trident missles.
The two ways to represent data does actually conflict a little bit, storing piano roll data and tracking data does need to look a little bit differently on the inside. In a tracker, it’s important what note column you store a specific note on, you can e.g. store a note with a higher pitched note both left and right of a note with a lower pitch. That data isn’t stored with a piano roll interface. Also, a piano roll requires every note to end somewhere, as note-ons are tied to note-offs. A tracker can represent an endless note, or even putting two note-offs after each other. Finally, a tracker limitation is that effect commands are tied to rows, in a piano roll, there can be multiple effect commands with different timings within what would in a tracker be a tracker row.
true, but they are more pros and cons of the interface being used and how the save file organises the data(i think?), rather than how the interface converts the data into sound. take a vsti for example, they expect messages to be sent to them in a certain way, and all interfaces have to send it the same way for compatability regardless of how the interface is worked with.(but i could be totally incorrect, as im now sober(ish) and not quite so bold:-))
The pianoroll should just be another view of the same note data.
So, let’s say you’re editing a track in ‘pianoroll mode’ and you enter multiple note events that start and end within the same row.
Renoise should find an empty column in the trackdata (or add a new one) to avoid clashes, in the same way it already does when recording live midi input or entering chords.
No?
And please, can people stop with the OMG RENOISE IS A TRACKER, PIANOLOLS ARE GHEY stuff.
This thread is about PIANOROLLS, if you don’t like them or can’t get your headcheese around how they could be useful in Renoise, don’t read it.
Would the piano roll be possible to make with new scripting in 2.6? It’s on RC1 now, so it would be available to everyone.
Possibly. Somebody has already made a pretty nice pianoroll-ish script (haven’t tried it yet) but I believe this should be fully integrated into the Renoise GUI with a per-track view toggle switch (as suggested in loads of mockups in this thread).
Some more thoughts
In normal use, you’d probably have only a few tracks in a song in ‘PR Mode’ (chords, pads) and the majority in traditional tracker view (basslines, leads, rhythms), and you’d probably not be hitting the view toggle buttons much at all once you’d made those decisions - ‘OK, this one is a PR track, this one is a Tracker track’ etc.
In those PR tracks, you wouldn’t really care so much about the actual layout of the note data in their tracker-view columns.
Infact, I imagine they would potentially look a total mess if you’d done a lot of PR editing and then switched back to tracker view, but you shouldn’t really care – in the same way that looking at some drum beats in PR mode would be nonsensical.
a display of 15 overlapping instruments