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 miss it too, even though the last version that had it (3.4.3?) was a bit wonky when using it with older versions of Reason, which was my main ReWire client in Renoise. The VST version of Reason is so limited in comparison to having the full program under control of Renoise.
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.
I would guess that the end of support by Propellerhead means that as new operating systems come out there isn’t any testing or development done against them, so certain features might break as time goes on. It seems like every program registers itself as ReWire capable each time it is started, and places its own library in the right location on the system for other programs to find it (if it isn’t there already). If the library uses system calls that are no longer available it will fail to run when loaded by another program as a host or client. My guess is this would be the reason (no pun intended!) why devs are dropping it, though the fact it is only an inter-application protocol suggest that it’s unlikely such a problem would arise as the host program should be safe to do the main audio/MIDI system calls.
Also, as time goes on and there are less programs to run as ReWire clients, it would become pretty pointless to keep it in (this is pretty much where we are already).
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.
It looks like it takes over the whole client application’s audio processing, and the GUI then acts as a kind of control surface…! Wonder if that’s actually the case? Seems a bit extreme!
Wish I had downloaded the SDK years ago when I had access to it. Currently it’s the only one they no longer offer for download. This is why proprietary protocols are shit.
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?
Open Source Tracktion Engine still includes the ReWire implementation:
Which is great for getting an understanding of how it works. Problem is that to build with ReWire enabled requires the ReWireSDK (for the API headers), so some of it is still a black box. I expect if you tried to compile it with the macro enabled but no SDK available you would get build errors.
I wish they would just make it open source, so pointless to keep dead technology under wraps.
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.
