I found it on a linux distro where it was pre installed. I think it was KXStudio which was a spin ooff of Ubuntu
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I met Renoise on KVRAUDIO sometime in 2007/2008 - before I got, “banned from KVR,” lol… I was a rock metal musician, and I had just returned from living in Europe where I was going to music production school. I didn’t have a long background in music production or, “electronic music production,” when I found this program.
Anyways, I was desperately looking for something that A. I could afford, and B. I could use to sequence my synths and drums, because nothing was working for me. I somehow stumbled onto this demo video with this French dude named Baguette, and he was showing how nicely synths sequence in this tracker named Renoise, and I said to myself, “hmm, I need to try that.”
This was right around the time when Arguru died, that I got into this program. I bought a license to Renoise sometime in 07/08… Can’t remember how long I used the demo for, before I got a license. It would be another few months, to a year until I joined these forums.
I can’t imagine making music with something else. I am not interested in other trackers, I am simply 100% Renoise. I do have Cubase Pro, because I need it for some of the things I do; but all my drums, all my bass, all my synths are created in, sampled in, and sequenced in Renoise. 98% of my mix is in Renoise, when my projects are far enough along, they do get rewired into Cubase for various reasons…
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Renoise was recommended to me in the year 2011 by a remixer of the C64 scene. I’ve always wanted to have a tracker being able to implement plugins. Started with music in the year 1991 on Amiga with Soundtracker, switched to Noisetracker, switched to Protracker, switched from Amiga to PC to Fasttracker and after a break of round about 10 years switched to Skaletracker. None of them could implement VSTs and the quality was limited as well as the options of creating. So I’m glad that my remix buddy recommended Renoise. Since that day my music became semiprofessional, before that day it was just a hobby. It’s still “just a hobby”, but on a higher level. And that’s exactly what I want. Of course I also tried out programs like Cubase or Ableton, but I don’t like the way creating music with these ones, I still prefer tracker based programs like Renoise. In my opinion it’s way more intuitive. I can drop a beat within minutes, I can create a complete Track including the mastering within a couple of hours. With Cubase or similar stuff I couldn’t do that. That’s why I’m using Renoise and for sure I won’t switch anymore to anything else.
Great job, Team Renoise! Keep it up! 
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I use to make music on floss software on Linux and after years of relatively painful and improductive music making I discover that Renoise just worked right out of the box.
Thanks to the Renoise team, I’ve now completely quit FLOSS software and couldn’t be happier.
But I kept Renoise… I tried Live, Logic Pro, Bitwig, Studio One… but no. Nothing beats Renoise.
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I think I chanced by some YouTube videos with Renoise, and then started looking seriously at it when it came up a few times in the Bitwig forums. I am a Bitwig enthusiast, and it’s remarkable (yet unsurprising) that there is so much overlap between Renoise & Bitwig. They’re similar, yet complementary.
Firmly rooted in Bitwig’s super smooth mouse-based workflow, I was craving some classic keyboard tracker action, missing FastTracker2 and step sequencing in general.
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My love for Linux overruled my love for Ableton, which isn’t supported on Linux… I considered using Wine, which seems pretty perverse. I tried Reaper and Ardour. Neither really caught my attention. Then I tried Renoise. The first, most obvious thing I noticed was the amazing visual design. It’s incredibly compact, efficient and just plain good-looking. As I continued using the demo, I kept finding features that Ableton didn’t have! I wrote down a list of the first few, but I quickly lost track. I’ve noticed that some people, such as @Neuro_No_Neuro, have basically decided to use native Renoise alone, without VSTs. I would feel perfectly comfortable just using native Renoise features. While I have no concrete evidence, I definitely feel that Renoise has more to offer than Ableton Live 9. I was initially in denial about leaving Ableton after 8 years, but it turns out there was something much better waiting for me on this side of the fence!
The most baffling thing about this experience was my expectations. According to popularity, price and consensus, Renoise is a second-rate (or more like fifth-rate) DAW. Why!? Does everyone just google “Renoise piano roll” and give up once they find out it doesn’t have one? The same goes for Linux. I’ve got everything I had on Windows and more.
Renoise is empowering. Everything is oriented towards control for the user. Front-end scripting support, theming, great keyboard integration, custom instruments, crazy signal paths, etc. In combination with the Linux environment I feel like I have real creative control. I’m happy to say that Renoise will be my creative home now. And I don’t see any reason to leave.
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What Renoise lacks compared to say, Ableton, is very little. A very small set of things that I’m hoping get added eventually - FM modulation of samples and granular synthesis. Other than those two audio source modulations, there really isn’t much else I can ask for at this juncture. There are also days where I seriously consider moving to Linux, because it’s beautiful and free.
Now, as for Reaper, I would also recommend that. And Audacity, and the standalone Paulstretch application (if there’s a version for Linux). One wouldn’t need much else for nearly every kind of electronic music. Cheap and/or free. And if a person really spends their time working on audio mixing, ideally would not need to spend money on plugins.
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+1 for the FM modulation & granular synthesis. In my ideal world, we could take two audio signals and combine them by any desired means (compiled expressions, for example). Even without oversampling, we’d get some awesomely powerful sounds. With oversampling, we could do crazy FM stuff without too many artifacts. Offer random access to the waveform and we’ll have granular & more… but I’m drifting from the topic, just wanted to upvote your idea!
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After using Reason for a few years (from 1.0.1 to 2.5) and loving it for the most part, I started to make more sample based hip hop and that’s where Reason shortcomings started to show. I’m talking mostly about really cumbersome working with samples. I needed external program for sampling and editing samples, external app for making rex files, NN19 sampler was pretty clumsy and NNXT was more oriented into multisamples than mangling samples, with no way to automate many precision controls.
So I looked into world of trackers, which I used back on my Amiga (Protracker and OctaMED) with TechnoSound Turbo 2 sampler and I remembered the various tracker commands that could do seriously cool things with samples directly from sequencer. I tried some, I kind of liked Modtracker but wasn’t really convinced. Then I found Renoise (was it version 1.27?) and was very impressed. I bought it at 1.5 and the rest is history 
Btw., recently I also bought latest Reason (Intro version, mostly to get varius old school devices that I loved like Redrum, Subtractor, Scream4, Matrix…) and now use it inside Renoise. It’s pretty great! Just shame the rack hides piano roll, otherwise it would be truly perfect Renoise companion.
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+1 for Renoise’s sampler. I’m definitely more of a sample guy than a synthesis guy, so a good sampler is really important to me. The Ableton Live sampler is nice but Renoise’s sampler is fully integrated rather than just a regular instrument. I love that huge waveform in the middle of my screen! And it goes without saying that slices are awesome.
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i was not from an oldschool tracker background at all.
after many years of being a non-computer muso, about 10-11 years ago i decided to add the computer to my music making tools. i began to look at daw software at that stage and stumbled upon renoise online.
i was intrigued by renoise and visited the renoise irc channel where several longtime users encouraged me to jump in and give it a try. it immediately clicked with me.
even though i now use many musical softwares (including a couple of other daw’s) i still love renoise for it’s simplicity (for me) and “directness”.
i’m so happy renoise is still being developed. hats off to taktik et al!
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So many good stories here I am so glad I started this thread.Come on people don’t be shy give me your stories.
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Good question.
My good friend introduced me to Venetian Snares about 10 years ago, and shortly after I found out he used Renoise heavily. I’ve always liked dabbling in Garage Band, so I started messing around in Renoise. It was overwhelming though - just made simple songs for a long time without learning the depths of the DAW. Just this past year I started learning it more and it’s coming together pretty intuitively, and it’s crazy cheap. I even record live piano and drums from my keyboard in it.
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I’m a HUGE fan of John Frusciante’s solo career (after leaving RHCP)
In some interview I read he used Renoise as his main DAW for his electronic stuff, which I love. That’s why I downloaded Renoise and after trying it a little bit, fell in love with it.
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I bought Renoise about 12 or so years ago, mainly because at the time I was utterly obsessed with Venetian Snares, and I read that he used it. I grabbed the demo and was instantly really impressed by the control and sound shaping capabilities. Once I realised that Renoise could play looped samples as short as a single wave cycle, and that it was basically a synth, I was totally hooked! Being able to hand draw a wave form is something I have always loved about Renoise. The ability to start with literally nothing at all, and make a whole track, is super appealing to me.
I’m a programmer by trade, and I immediately really enjoyed the keyboard driven approach of Renoise. I never liked having to enter notes with a mouse, using a piano roll.
I had had some exposure to trackers before. I had a flatmate who was extremely musically prolific, often producing multiple albums a month (he seriously had shelves full of albums he had made, in many many genres, complete with cover art, although for the most part they were never heard outside his bedroom). Seeing him fly around in his tracker of choice (not Renoise, but one of the older ones, one he had been using since he was a kid) had sold me on the idea that trackers were an excellent way to make music.
Even though I got into Renoise because of my interest in super fast glitch beats, I tend to use it to write quite mellow, low tempo electronic synth music these days. I love it.
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How many people want to see something never seen before : a full 18 year history on Renoise?
On my harddrive I have too precious never before released stufff here, but i want to know how many of you are excited about this shit, Should I do it ?
Cheers,
Celsius
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count me in!
Sure thing I am in
I just discovered Renoise very recently.
I was browsing some old threads from the idmproducers subreddit on Reddit, and found a post that was about how to create Aphex-twin style drums. In the comments somebody said something like “just use Renoise, it’s a lot easier to just type that all in”.
And “just typing it all in” sounded amazing to me, so here I am. And of course, it is indeed amazing
I still use Logic as my primary DAW, but drum programming in Renoise definitely clicks with me a lot more than it does in Logic, so I can’t imagine not using it at this point. In fact, I’d probably be more likely to drop Logic, if I had to drop one.
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I am not entirely sure how I met Renoise. I think watching Bizzy B tutorials. I have however only been using it for a couple/few weeks. I new of trackers, and they seemed so foreign to me. Years later I got a Nerdseq for my modular. It proved to be a bit too much as I was also learning modular at the same time. So I sold it, but i remembered how quick I got the Ideas out of my head. Last year I was working to upgrade from Live 9 to 10, but held off.
That is when i started hunting for a tracker to give it a try. I was watching some Bizzy B tutorials on some jungle stuff and saw him using it. It looked more like how my brain worked when working. So decided to buy it. Then it sat on my computer for nearly a year I think at this point. We were selling a house and buying a house and moving from Colorado to Oregon, then starting a new job as all this covid kicked off, it is only now settling down to where I have a little time to actually dive in. It has completely erased the want to upgrade live and has me kicking myself for not starting on it years ago. But hey i’m hear now and loving it.
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