i steal the CDs! so sue me
Concur.
I personally like Computer Music. It’s a good magazine.
Renoise gets a lot of attention considering we don’t have a fulltime sales and marketing department, buy ads, or play “the industry game” at the same level as other professional DAWs.
Furthermore, if we’re being honest, the music business is the recording industry, not the tracking industry. Renoise isn’t the best fit for people trying to record a band, or whatever.
Yeah and in my humble opinion, that’s what keeps Renoise from being a full scale DAW.
Good to see some balanced replies to the initial post. CM isn’t perfect but they do mention Renoise often, every time very positively. It always annoys me, however, when they don’t suggest it as a possible DAW, as far as I’m concerned Renoise can do anything I want, AND I work a lot with audio tracks!
Just received the latest CM, and the Trackers feature is presenting tutorials on the new features in 2.5, this can only be good for Renoise, but when it comes to the crunch, we know we’ve got an incredible piece of software to make music with, and if the rest of the world doesn’t know, well it’s their loss.
Can it record multiple audio tracks at the same time through different inputs, automatically adding the samples to the patterns in question? I’m fairly sure it can’t… and this is probably the #1 reason CM doesn’t present it as a DAW. Until it has this functionality, it will continue to be looked down upon by people when being conversed about as a DAW. It doesn’t have what people who record live bands need, and that’s a big drawback. This is primarily why, in my eyes, Renoise is a sequencer, not a DAW.
Almost exactly what I was going to say.
You don’t and you shouldn’t recommend something like Renoise for people that are interested in using recorded audio sequences and I bet majority of CM readers are.
Well, this is just semantics. Renoise is both, but lacking in features in the multitrack recording department.
DAWs go back to the 1980s. Does anyone think that the DAWs of the 1980’s looked like Logic today? I hope not. Does it invalidate them as DAWs? No, it does not.
For nerd factor sake, let me describe the computer I had in 1993:
- 33 mhz CPU
- 8 megabytes of RAM
- =~ 200 megabyte hard drive
This was a cutting edge 4000 dollar computer! It ran SAW!!!
Now I have 4 gigs of ram and whatever I was doing in DAWs before can be done in Renoise / RAM now; albeit in a way that is counter intuitive to the multitrack paradigm, but a “Digital Audio Workstation” it is.
I know its all semantics Conner_BW, but “DAW” really seems to mean “audio software that can do everything” these days
whatever it is, I don’t need to use anything else…
That does not mean that i can do everything with it…
And it does not mean it is actually usable either.
Need to get someone to mention Renoise in The Wire:
Push toward the high brows.
those snobs…
…
+1 !
send em the renoise g-string!
renoise should conquer the porn soundtrack industry!!!
seriously though,… the sooner you stop reading advertising magazines and stick to online forums the more you’ll actually learn.
Damn, I can’t stand fanbois.
some do more harm than good. (some[most of the]times)
Also there is something really important missing, that every other software can handle today → Rex / Rx2 import…
Computer Mag has actually done an awesome job for musicians with their Producer Masterclass -series. The best place anyone could look for advice is now at the fingertips of everyone.
The Reason why the big names are not using Renoise, can be seen to come down to the lack of the softwares current ability to import common filetypes that are most widely used in sample CD’s.
Rex and Rx2 is also the fileformat, which in any serious beat sequencer will save their own handmade loops in.
There is no other format, that can handle multiple clips of audio, their timing in midi based timing format, handling all the clips envelopes by changing just one slider, changing the whole beats tune - without the timing suffering etc…
Now these are the features, all major DnB producers (though I dislike the word producer - but that’s what most people call themselves) will be looking after - and all of them are currently missing in Renoise - all due to the absence of a beatslicing unit, that is compatible with the most common fileformat on the industry.
Now back in the days - Trackers (such as FT2 & ProTracker) were used by Omni Trio, and many Jungle producers because of their most efficient way of handling and arranging beats…
…That same flexibility is still there - when it comes to arranging - but Renoise (and all other trackers) have fallen behind in the ability to load beats into them - aswell as the ability to “quickly adjust” the parameters of all the components in the loop that’s being edited…
This is where it simply boils down to Rex support.
Also I see this abit disturbing, since Renoise has all that anyone with fast mind and lots of stuff to be created would be looking for.
1…Fast and ease of use without (mostly) having to jam the workflow with touching the mouse…
2…one can dive inside the beat - in renoise - like in no other software…
3.
Sadly the part 3 is still missing, which would be the ability to load ones loops into the program.
Now ReWire was a huge and needed step to get Renoise incorporated into any serious music makers setup, but the other step would be to provide all the bang for the buck that Renoise can - and what Renoise is the best and the strongest at - which is it’s capacity to allow for lighting fast editing and arranging of beats, that are playing on ones track in form of easily editable pattern data.
I am totally with Happy Milshake man on the question of Beatslicer (…that has been discussed on other parts of the forum…) - but it really needs to be well thought out, and it needs to stand up to the days standards.
[i]edit:
The needed features are:
- Full control of envelopes to all clips - behind just few mouseclips. (a master envelope for multiple clips)
- Full control of pitch and finetune to all clips used in the pattern, or Rex, or imported pre sliced beat - all behind one fader also
- The possibility to nondestructively adjust the start and end points of each clip
…and that’s it…
Combine that to the innovative user interface Renoise has, and there is no rivaller for Renoise in terms of ease and possibility to mangle and compose ones beats.
Also one other idea would be simply to make Renoises own beatsformat, that had all the features mentioned above → people could use a translator software to convert their files into Renoise beatsformat - incase there is something about the patents that Propellerhead are holding.[/i]
For the record, Rex is a proprietary format. It’s not an open standard at all. It’s like MP3 vs OGG. Someone owns the patent on MP3 which makes it a legal hassle to support. Same goes for Rex. Only their dev partners are allowed to support it.
Source: http://www.recordingmag.com/resources/resourceDetail/323.html
Really going offtopic now, but since we are discussing about sample formats (and of course by sample formats I also mean formats that define how samples are played) - here goes.
I’d really like to see native sfz support in Renoise. Wouldn’t mind if xrni development wouldn’t be continued and it remained legacy format and the effort would be put into implementing sfz playback and editing. Features that Renoise uses or would benefit from could be handled with custom opcodes.
Yeah, I kinda guessed this.
Since Propellerheadz are such p*in in da *ss, it would be a perfectly fitting solution to have a native beats format, that had similar features (aswell as the ones we already have in Renoise - forward & ping-pong loop points for individual samples etc.) as the rex files.
All we would then need (or what the renoise devs might need to do, and I am sort of counting the userbase there also, since we are changing ideas here openly), is to get around the legal hassle that has to do with rex not being an open fileformat… By having a tool to convert rex files into Renoise beatsformat, we might get around this - just like it was done in Stylus RMX - that has all the benefits of a sliced up fileformat (…exept the ability to edit ones SAGE beats for more precise timing, once they are loaded…).
Yet it does not have rex support, but functions basically just like one that does…
…is there something that would be considered as a legal hassle regarding such an approach…?
Yes, I also view Renoise as a sequencer, not a DAW.
And I hope that it niches itself and continue to be developed as a sequencer, to make fast tracker sequencing even faster, instead of trying to keep up with all development in the DAW world.
I only use Renoise as the means for putting down the notes at lightspeed, but I use other software for everything else.
In fact, I only care about a feature such Scripting in 2.6 to the extent it will enable me to improve the workflow by having scripts doing stuff to the notes in the sequencer that would take me much more time to do manually.