This is my first posting to Renoise, I never really planned to do it. I think a Piano Roll View for our favorite
tracker is a waste of developement time & money. Everyone knows there’s a million DAW’s that offer this.
One year ago, I didn’t even know what a tracker was. I’ve played with Ableton Live, Cubase, Sonar,
ACID, Zynewave Podium, and Computer Musics’ CMusic. In Fact, it was the magazine that turned me on
to trackers & Renoise last year. Anyway, I fell in love with trackers because my level of productivity
skyrocketed instantly after (quickly) learning how to use Renoise. Point being, all those other DAWs can
keep their Piano Rolls. Tracking rules. By the way, try Aodix (Tracker, Modular VST environment) if you
would like to see what a Piano Roll view might be like in Renoise. It even runs vertically on the left side of
the pattern editor. If you like it, please stay there! I joined Renoise at the beginning of the 1.9 betas,
and will probably stick with 1.9 if Renoise starts to look like Cubase.
Don’t worry… if there gonna be a pianoroll it will be something extra but not core functionality.
Though it is getting harder and harder to stuff everything inside one window.
I foresee an extended control panel on the bottom coming up to switch between various screen control elements.
Yeah, there’s barely room for the ‘make toast’ button for 2.0 as it is…
Hoo boy…i’m “new” here but in actuality, i tried renoise a couple years back and am now returning to give it another look. It has definitely come along nicely.
This idea of a piano roll though…i feel it’s probably a bit overboard for this program.
I feel a better suggestion is (and sorry if i am explaining this wrong…I don’t speak “geek”… 
) the ability to record into the tracker like one is recording in realtime within a piano roll. SO wherever the song position is at in the timeline, that’s where the note gets placed. I really see no benefit to a piano roll other than cosmetics.
My 2 cents…
this might be a little off topic, but since i play guitar (and probably others do too), the coolest thing on earth
for me would be a tab - role. it could be lying from top to bottom, so the trackerstyle could be kept AND
in opposite to a piano role, no extra space is needed when going octaves up and down (since it’s the principle
of tablature - 6 lines and values for the freds, more values in the same line mean chord…)
i know this is only for the guitar people, but i would die for that feature 
some other guitarheads here?
a piano-roll in renoise could be an interesting thing
As a new member ( yes I have purchased renoise) an,d totally not used to trackers , the main reason I bought renoise was it’s flexibility for programmning beats and sample mangling …nothing beats a tracker in that aspect
…never used one before but getting the grips of it verry fast …the only drawback I experience is in the programmming of melodies …not saying that a pianoroll is better…but I am just more used to it …
But hey …I love renoise for what it is ( and what it’s not …read fully bloated sequencer )…the lack of internal midi routing …multi vst support( separate outputs etc…) etc…
But the question is …will it remain a tracker if a painoroll is implented ? Sure it will …we can only benefit from it …take a look at sonicbytes era …( to bad it can’t be used inside renoise cause it requires a midi output )
Cheers …oh yeah …just do that pianoroll thingie 
looking forward to hear more about what to come in renoise in the future
I only started using Renoise recently (I first downloaded the demo in October and purchased a license last month after I decided that I was familiar with it). As someone who has spent all of their time in PT, FL, and Live, I decided the following things:
-I would love a piano roll, but compared to having an arranger, a time-stretcher, and pattern zooming/sub-ticks, it’s relatively unimportant.
-The primary reason that I would even care about having a piano roll is when it comes to dealing with polyphony. It’s not that I need to visualize the notes on the roll, but instead, tracking columns can get mighty ugly when you’re building large chords and chord movements. Having a track that’s eight or nine play columns wide certainly takes up a ton of screen real estate.
thelizard is damn right: dealing with huge chords is surely easier using a piano roll rather than a pattern styled view.
i somehow cant read the last post posted in this thread,i get a error message when i try to
but how is the work going with the piano-roll thing??is this really going to happen ???
whats right
maybe most pr trakering musicians ar useing renoise becouse there are no piano roll
Have you heard of Aodix? Granted, it’s vertical, and there won’t be a new version ever again (RIP Arguru), but still, it proves my point. 
I would really like a piano roll, the reason being that i want to use what i’m recording live from my midi keyboard. As things are now, the track editor has a really bad resolution and non-intuitive way of dealing with this need, and i guess that a piano roll would feature millisecond resolution like all modern sequencers? Otherwise i wouldn’t care…
The tracker is mainly suited for electronic music with its current design…
I have used the tracker since 1998, and I’m so used to FT2, Modplug Tracker, and Renoise that I practically know the most effectivent ways to use the tracker interface.
I’m also an experienced user of sequencers, and can handle the piano roll interface of various sequencers very well. There are indeed a lot of things that the piano roll does worse, particularily related to inputting notes (the piano roll is designed for people who can hit the record button and play all the melodies realtime, and is by that reason very slow when you want to create melodies by inserting notes other ways). However, there are tons of things that the piano roll always does better than the tracker no matter if you know every tracker keyboard shortcut there is. If you state otherwise you just don’t have enough experience with the piano roll.
- As Joel mentioned, high resolution is a problem with the tracker. It takes extra time to move a note in smaller steps than one row (the delay command).
- Complex selections will always be 10 times slower with a tracker.
- All kinds of operations on complex selections (changing the length of a group of notes, quantizing, note velocity curves/adjustments, etc.)
- Triplets (With the tracker the use of the note delay command has to be used for something that is so basic…)
- Modification of the position and length of single notes also is faster. With the tracker you’ll have to move the cursor across a lot of empty space to reach your note even if you use the page up and down keys. With a good sequencer, you can select your note using the arrow keys (since it only selects existing notes and skips all the empty space, it involves far less keypresses), and once it’s selected make adjustments to the position of both the note-on and note-off with simple keyboard shortcuts.
Even with a new pattern zoom feature that would finally provide a better resolution, you’ll have to zoom in a lot to actually be able to modify the data with the resolution you need, and you’ll lose the overview at the same time, and either have to scroll around or zoom out to locate other notes you wish to edit with that resolution. With a piano roll, you don’t even have to zoom in to perform those changes, that would usually just be all about selecting one or a few notes, and using one or two keyboard shortcuts.
I think it’s sort of weird that people think that ‘the piano roll suck’ when it’s really them who suck with the piano roll. If you can quickly toggle between the tracker pattern and piano roll mode, those who are good users of both and knows when to use each will get the most powerful interface combo in history. Those who just won’t use one of them because they think it sucks (because they’re not good enough to take adventage of it)… Well, it’s their problem - but I’ve heard about enough blaming the interface for people’s own lack of skill with it.
What’s all this ‘piano roll involves too much mousing’ all about anyway? Like anything else, the piano roll is all about keyboard shortcuts, mousing should only be used to make selections. With many good sequencers, everything else involves combinations of the ctrl/shift/alt+arrow keys and more.
amen to that
Nifflas, i think you make some good points. And i agree that a pianoroll would be a good addition.
BUT most 90% what you are saying is an advantage with a pianoroll can be achived with just some small design improvments.
I think the 2 best benefits of a pianoroll is the visualization of the notes
(which in most cases also is one of the dissadvatages, the notes are spread all over the screen.) and the what comes with it, the ability to select notes only by their placement within a certain range.
The other thing is that it could broaden the userbase and help secure Renoise future.
This is why I would most want a pianoroll…
Higher resolution, quantisize, finetune several notes at once, adding and subtracting from a selection, sorting notes by pith, could all be done to work in the pattern enviroment just as good as it would in a pianoroll…
if you want a piano roll, why are you using a tracker?
I was against Piano roll but from the MIDI-point of view I guess this pianoroll-stuff would bring better editing options. At least IMHO.