It was a very sad day when Ableton decided to end support (even unofficial) of ReWire. Recently I decided to go back to Live 10 in order to use the ReWire with Renoise again as this was a superb combination.
To my horror I find that Renoise v3.5 onwards has removed support for ReWire. Oh my days. Would you please consider adding ReWire support back into Renoise please? Just a ‘legacy’ mode for it that does not require ongoing support. It worked fine the way it was.
I disagree. ReWire still works perfectly well. Therefore its still useful.
Steinberg no longer supports VST2, does that mean we should remove VST2 support from Renoise? Of course not, because there’s lots of amazingly useful tools and reasons to still use VST2. And so it is with ReWire.
Of course there will be a point where it fails. Where it ceases to function in any useful way. Not for a long time though.
And there’s nothing like ReWire, there are things like VST2. So we could argue that the sheer lack of counterpart, the absence of anything that does what it does as brilliantly as it does, would make ReWire something worth supporting, worth preserving. Regardless of the halt on its ongoing development. It still works. It will not stop working for a very long time.
And to your point about there becoming fewer ReWire clients.. the prophecy will be self fulfilling if we take that stance eh? While there are still clients out there that support ReWire let’s not be part of its untimely demise!
I for one have asked Propellerheads to release ReWire into open source, that the people who still care about it, who still find great value and uniqueness in it, be able to maintain it and extend its life long into the future.
Rewire surely was a good API regarding its capabilities, yet it is considered dead for quite a long time now. I think Propellerhead themselves ruined it by:
Not publishing it as open source
Not maintaining it anymore
Make it difficult to access for devs
So in the end, it was a bad choice for 3rd parties. That’s why it seems to me very rationable to remove it. Ableton reacted early, IMHO good to move on then most quickly. They also came up with Ableton Link then. Link works quite well, I think even with supporting hardware? Of course midi and audio transfer is completely missing. You can compensate that at least under macOS using OS’es virtual midi devices and a audio loopback driver? Still this is very inconvenient, and not a proper feature-wise replacement. Maybe a good idea actually would be an audio “tunneling” vst… Because it will properly save the settings along with your song then.
Might be time to consider that the whole idea wasn’t the best, to use two DAWs at once.
Or ask Bitwig, U-He and the Surge dev team (@baconpaul) to come up with a replacement standard?
It’s a shame Redux doesnt have simple timeline sync like ReWire. I find the whole idea of triggering patterns based on MIDI notes not so helpful really. I’d much prefer a 1:1 song/pattern editor like with Renoise and simple syncing with the host.
The Sync button above the Phrase grid in Redux does that. It plays back the selected phrase automatically when the host starts playing and while playing switches quantized to beats.
Yes, indeed! It seems there’s proper beat/bar sync now. This wasn’t implemented back then when we added Jack Sync support on Linux.
I’ll check how well that works and also check how hard it is to get that working on Windows. There are maybe not many hosts out there which support Jack (sync) right now on Windows and MacOS but maybe this changes in future, now that ReWire basically is gone everywhere…
So this is 1:1 with Renoise pattern syncing through ReWire?
I guess not really because the ReNoise pattern sequencer is quite different to the Redux phrase sequence.
With Renoise and Ableton 10 via ReWire, you just add a list of patterns to the Renoise song amd then no matter where the playhead is i the ableton arrangement, the correct paytern/beat is played back in Renoise.
It’s just such a crying shame that we (or rather I, selfishly) cannot continue to use Renoise as part of my workflow forever.. it just breaks my heart.
I felt the same way when ReWire support was discontinued in Cubase and Reason. I like both worlds. Redux never fully replaced Renoise for me (and it’s not even meant to be). One reasonable approach is to build the basic idea in one environment—say, Renoise—export the result WAVs into another DAW you like, add whatever you need via the piano roll, and then export it back into Renoise. It’s a bit roundabout, but it’s a sensible workflow that doesn’t put as much strain on CPU and memory. And in a DAW where you only need a few tracker sequences, you can “just” use Redux.
