Personally, I prefer dealing with loops with Ableton Live… that’s why I now make my loops/songs in Renoise and when I need to deal with loops for live performances, I render them and use them in Live.
However, for drums, I’d rather use Renoise than any other software any day.
Renoise is WAAAAY faster and lots of features needed for cool drum programming at right at your finger tip, Renoise is my drum machine on steroids!
To give you an idea of Renoise is for you, I’ll try to tell you how I’d do each of your 5 tasks:
- Saying the word pad makes me want to link my little sequencer too using the Launch Pad with Renoise… Renoise Based Audio-video Step Sequencer That could be a way to do something similar to what you want to do, except that I’d rather use a 256 monome to use this kind of sequencer… now for the MPC you want to press a button and bang it plays this loop. Yes you can do this. You can map the controller pad midi message to the play button next to each pattern that will let you cue this pattern for it to play once the previous one is playing… that’s sweet. Some guy does this with his livid controller: http://hitoritori.tumblr.com/tagged/Renoise_techniques
- You can map this to a knob, yeah… There’s not tap tempo yet but I bet that feature is coming in next version.
- For real time, I’d use Ableton Live, otherwise, Renoise does it just fine.
- What? I don’t understand.
- Yeah Renoise easily does that?
Renoise is definitely handy, but I think you might want to take a look at Ableton Live… I like to use both in my workflow.