Integrating Renoise into other DAW/Workflow

Howdo, hope you are all well.

Getting Renoise into my workflow is an ongoing goal for me. I love Renoise, tracking is in my blood. I am sure you can relate.

For a while I was using a bizarre arrangement where, via ReWire, I’d got Renoise and Ableton Live coupled as my composing setup, feeding into Reaper for mixing and stuff. This worked pretty well but, invariably I ended up just going back to using Ableton Live. This is because Live, for me at least, feels right and is a reasonable compromise all things considered.

Then along came Redux! Hooray I thought… But not quite. Triggering patterns via MIDI or whatever was cumbersome. It was way better with Renoise slaved to Ableton via Rewire. Then I could just set up so wherever I was in my ableton project, Renoise would shuttle no problems. So back to that.

Then Ableton Link support! Nope, this doesnt really help too much in my case.

All I really need is Renoise to slave to another DAW … transport/timeline 1:1 … but future proofed where ReWire is seemingly on the way out.

I really hoped that Redux was the answer but a phrase sampler is not the same as Renoise+Another DAW in perfect sync.

I was hoping that Renoise could be a VST3 plug … or CLAP or something that would integrate seamlessly.

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Tactic once said that making Renoise a VST was problematic because of the size when saving the host project. So a Renoise instance full of samples could be quite big and this would break some VST law. It’s an interesting situation, I suppose you could limit the size of VST instances and not allow above a certain file size. I feel there might be several workarounds.

What I do know for certain is that Renoise is great and Redux is great as well, but it’s no Renoise by a long chalk. Getting Renoise into a modern workflow would seem to be a clear path for it’s future… because very few people are going to be using Renoise for scoring a film or similar project… but Renoise has so many strengths that it’s absolutely relevant in playing a part in that endeavor.

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Yes.

Consider Kontakt, for example. You can load many GB of data into that and have it resident in RAM. This data is not saved into your Cubase project file size, but rather reloads into Kontakt when you load the project. I think this is possible for Renoise.

I would like to hear from the Devs about the future of Renoise and how they think it will fit into a progressive idea of workflow.

Maybe it doesnt need to be progressive. Maybe Renoise, as an island, is enough. If you want to make tracker music then use Renoise … or don’t use it and don’t maker tracker music either. But I really hope for more, that it can become airborne and float wherever people need it to be. Renoise and the tracking paradigm really deserves to go into the future and be relevant to as many artists as possible.

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Oh god, please no. skeuomorphic ideas of patch cables with inputs/outputs. Lets just put all that to bed for good - we can do far better than that UXP with modern interfaces.

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I totally get the modular/patch-cable thought process. It does help to solidify ideas as you move forward through your sound design. However, I feel that the efficacy of this starts to unravel into chaos as things become increasingly complex.

A modern UI seeks to remove the noise from complexity and present the salient components and their relationships as simply as possible. Bitwig is pretty good at this.

But anyway, yes, Reniose as a plugin… Why ever not? @taktik I’d love to start a fruitful conversation about this.

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Patching is indeed simple. And I think that it starts to get cumbersome when things become more complex.

Consider a mixing desk, for example. Or indeed any synth with hardwired signal paths. Then consider the modular synths … and how useful they really are for people trying to get work done.

But yeah - being able to lift the cover and get into the circuit and rewire things is all good … But personally I dont have time for this … I just want a DAW to present simple ways to perform complex things.

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I noticed that FL Studio can be loaded as a VST plugin to another DAW. This one single feature made me change my DAW of choice to FL Studio as I want to build my workflow around Renoise.

Here’s how I plan to do my workflow. I start creating a song in Renoise, and once I want to record audio, I export the tracks as audio to FL Studio and do my recordings there. Then I continue working with the song in Renoise, loading the FL Studio as a plugin and opening the FL Studio project for the audio recordings. I can rearrange everything without audio exports etc. The only problem with this work flow is that once I want to record more audio, I have to open the FL Studio as an application and not as a plugin. But for perfect and unproblematic sync I can live with that.

(FL Studio feels rather funny to me, but I guess I will get used to it)

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I recommend Blue Cat Connector. It’s $40 and has replaced Rewire for me.

Streams midi or audio from one daw to another with virtually no latency. I do all my MIDI in Renoise and host the VSTs in Bitwig this way.

If they update Renoise so the Ableton Link play/stop works this combo will give pretty much everything rewire could do. Taktik said they didn’t put the play sync in because they weren’t sure if people would use it. Clearly we will!

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Nice, will try that plug-in, too!

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nice sounds good, thanks for heads-up, will give it a whirl…

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I really need to sign in here more often but since this is a topic that comes up now and then and is the bane of us musicians/composers who send audio between DAWs–for future reference you can use Renoise via Rewire in Nuendo 12 and Ableton 11 (I do so frequently) via third party VSTs.

On my end everything is in sync, I have up to 16 stereo pairs from Renoise that can be sent out of the Nuendo instrument rack, and I can freeze/bounce/render in place my Renoise submixes directly in Nuendo with a right click (basically, I still have all the time saving features that streaming audio vst’s and virtual cables nuendon’t sorry, had to make a vintage meme reference)

Solution: On my Windows machine, in Ableton and Nuendo I’m using the VST instrument version of Plogue Bidule as it supports Rewire instruments (Windows only for the VST). I made a template file that loads a Rewire instance of Renoise, slaves it to the correct time, and sends audio out the busses. So, when I load the template in Bidule Renoise fires up immediately, ready to go in either Nuendo or Ableton.

Aside from Bidule there are some other less expensive VSTs that support Rewire on both Mac and PC but I haven’t tested them. The one I saw on KVR (I forget the name offhand) only supported like 4 submixes though, not the full 16, but not everyone needs that I guess? Offline rendering into your DAW itself is enough of a timesaver.

Anyway, since VSTs aren’t going away anytime soon, I feel safely future-proofed until the future can provide the basic equivalent functionality of this now old software

Would JACK not do the same thing for free?

The current stuff I’m working on is guitar / vox heavy so I tend to bounce sequenced stuff out of Renoise then continue audio recording and mixing in Ardour. Not tried the JACK route yet but might give it a go as I like using Renoise fir everything really and not just sequencing.

If Renoise could record ssmples from multiple inputs then I’d have no need for any other DAW ever…!

Curious how you’re finding Ardour? I’ve had my eye on it for a while, been meaning to join their forum and ask a few questions about it .

Aye I love it. I used Reaper for over 10 years like but just kind of inexplicably got sick of it, even though it works amazingly well in Linux.

Heard an interview with Paul Davis and read a lot about him and Robin Gareus and their whole thing just struck a chord with me so I just started using Ardour from v7.

Takes a bit of effort to get into I think but the documentation is brilliant, the programme works efficiently and after a bit of learning / adjusting I find it really good to use.

My Reaper license stop at the end of v6 and I’m not sure if I’ll renew. I will however keep donating to Ardour snd Airwindows and will renew my Renoise license in 65 years once we hit v4.

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optimist :upside_down_face:

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It might i cant verify because I’ve had problems getting it to work

Looking at it no I don’t think it would work the same. Jack seems capable of sending the audio output of one program to another. BC Connector can send the audio output of individual tracks to another program. Depends on your usecase I guess

I am interested in hearing more about this approach. I am a new user of Renoise/Redux. I recently made the jump to Nuendo 13 on Win 10 and am trying to move forward with only VST3s. I have Plogue Bidule and the VST3 installed, and the current version of Renoise. I am struggling to get any of this work in my composing template.

If I load the bidule VST3 in the Rack and choose the rewire example, I do not even show the correct modules, but if I load Bidule as an app, it does. Even if I run Bidule as an app, I can not seem to make it a Rewire master.

I know this is probably rudimentary stuff, and I am new to both of these tools you mentioned. Your workflow sounds like it is what I am looking for.

Any suggestions, screen shots, etc…

Thank you.

I’m not 100% sure the problem you are running into so: in the Bidule menu, when running it as a standalone app, and you right click in the window to see all the tools you can add to your current patch, do you have a Rewire menu? You need to open the Rewire menu, and Renoise will be listed there if rewire is working correctly. Click on Renoise and it will start automatically. If it doesn’t show up in the Bidule rewire menu, uninstalling and reinstalling Renoise has been how I’ve got it to work in the past.

I’d also suggest that you get it working in the standalone app first because sometimes rewire is disabled in the VST version and won’t show up in the right click menu. If you run into this you’ll need to contact the devs on the plogue forum. I can’t remember off the top of my head, but I had to enable it to work in VST mode before once, it was just a setting somewhere in a file I think.

Once it’s working you shouldn’t have to touch it again. I saved a Bidule template with renoise mapped out to all the output channels, and I can just load it into any daw I want now (Nuendo, live, bitwig).

I can send you a screenshot later, I’m just at work right now and hoped this reply might be enough to get you up and running

(Also, going back a ways, but to explain why anyone would bother with this:
Tools like JACK and soundflower are cool, but not a replacement for Rewire. Rewire syncs your DAWs and you can right click and offline bounce up to 32 tracks easily from Renoise as if it were a multichannel plugin in Nuendo. Going back to virtual midi and audio cables makes for way more work and time. It truly sucks that nothing out there adequately replaces this)

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