I’ll update this as I start playing around with the new beta, and it looks great guys, I mean, damn. Everything’s so nice and anti-aliased.
However, there’s one design choice that I noticed on the front page that I don’t really agree with personally. One of the little things I always really liked about Renoise was how you had the screen divided into thirds:
- Top section was for disk browsing, basic song settings and navigation, instruments, and scopes.
- Middle section for the matrix, patterns, mixer, instrument editor, and sampler.
- Bottom was for effects chains, more editing, automation, etc.
In 3.0, now we have the disk browser on the right side. This is kinda wonky to me, because I never had a problem with navigating the browser before. Now the browser is fighting for space with the matrix and the pattern editor, and it seems counter-intuitive now that I need to minimize several windows to see how my levels are averaging in the mixer or looking at notes across tracks in the pattern editor. I’m sure I could start setting up some shortcuts to deal with this, but right now it’s really odd doing this. This is not a huge deal though, and honestly I’ll get used to it in about two weeks. Just wondered why that decision was made.
But, to expand on the GUI in general, it’s really good. I like how some things can be stretched out for a better look, and honestly, I could get used to modulating through all the possible viewpoints. The automation section was something that I thought needed work in the past versions, and it seems really fluid in this version. I’m kind of baffled with some of the new features, so I’ll come back and edit this when I get more in-depth with the beta.
Happy holidays!