Why not rendering the VST?
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Twice the work (at least), different result. 
VST’s and professional Sample Packs, seems kinda “pay to win”, i’d give it a go but it would feel like cheating.
We use vst effects also
I don’t get this VST problem. I always thought most compos on the forum were ruling them out of the submissions for the sake of easier file sharing. When your XRNS doesn’t rely on plugins, but only on native devices, it can be opened by anyone with Renoise and it will play like it was intended to play. The whole compo is way more convenient that way and there’s less fuzz when you can just open any XRNS and it just works, whether you have some plugin or not.
Just use VSTs to your heart’s content in any way you want, and when your done, just freeze the tracks by rendering them out and putting them on a separate track inside your XRNS. I really fail to see how that is any different to, for example recording a sound into your project and tweaking and processing it 'till you’re happy with it. And I doubt anyone would consider recording your own sounds from hardware synths or with an actual microphone “cheating”, at least in any really meaningful way. How is using a hardware compressor and printing that into your project file any different from using a plugin compressor and printing that to your project file? I don’t think it is in any way that really matters, and I don’t think we should consider either “cheating”. And honestly, it doesn’t really take more than couple of minutes of extra work at the end, certainly doesn’t double the workload. I really fail to see any real problem there. 
I always use a couple of favourite plugins for my pianos, since the plugin grabber just doesn’t do them justice (round robins, hammer noises, pedal noises and velocity layers just don’t really translate IMHO). When I’m done and happy with what I’ve got, I just render what I’ve done to save some CPU cycles. In compos I leave my original midi in a separate muted “dummy” track, so anyone actually interested can still see what I’ve done to make the sounds, and just remove the VST. I don’t think I’m cheating any more than I would be if I recorded my acoustic piano and put that recording into my project. And how exactly would that be “cheating”? So if there’s no explicitly stated rules on sound sources in a given compo, what really is the problem here? I just don’t see it.
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I voted for the “???” thread, because I would like something with lyrics. The lyrics could be only one word, or a complete text, accoustic, robotic, autotuned, vocoder, text-to-speech, sampled, spoken or sung or whispered or yelled, in the language you want, all musical styles, with or without VST. Remember that Daft Punk made a banger tune with only 3 words (“Around The World”).
I also voted for the cats because this old thread shows the potential of cats:
EDIT: ok, sorry, I didn’t read that the ??? was equal to ALL VST, sadly, so now, I defo want the cats 
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So everyone who doesn’t design his own sounds from scratch is kinda “cheating”?
There must be A LOT of “cheaters” out there, whether professional musicians or amateurs…
That’s absolutely ok and makes sense in a certain way. But at the same time this also excludes a ton of stuff. Rendering VSTs is definitely not the solution because the result would be way different. Rendering tracks is a lot better in this case, but also a lot of work, especially if there are a lot of tracks to render. If I would like to render all my tracks of every pattern using VSTs, I would have to render round about 200-350 tracks per song. There’s no way I will do this. This would not only double the effort, this would multiply the work. In the end the whole song would primarily consist of rendered tracks, no one could see how it’s done, unless you leave the original tracks untouched and muted.
Anyway, I see what you’re after and it’s completely understandable, but I guess this is not the right competition for me to participate. I prefer something like what’s shown in the video I posted above. Something without any limitations. I was limited for 20 years in terms of composing (limited CPU, limited RAM, limited DAW, limited number of tracks, limited number of samples, limited sample quality etc., limitations everywhere) and I worked with samples only. The reason why I switched to Renoise is the possibility of using VSTs, too. That’s what I’m doing for 11 years now, and I surely won’t take a step back. Why should I work with recorded instruments and all its limitations if I could work directly with the instruments? That’s how I see it. But of course it’s great if the MBC competition is about to show other users how to do native sound design, how to use crazy pattern effect commands, how to manipulate samples and so on. Perhaps those who work differently “need” another competition.
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Yep, there are, some folks just have a look and a label does it all; but that’s not important really.
I’m not saying it IS cheating but just like I said above, but perhaps more clearly stated, “I would feel
like im cheating myself for using other peoples loops or vst presets in a Tracker Compo”. = )
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I don’t think it’s cheating, I just know for myself, it would feel like cheating… Or at least it would feel inauthentic to my process. But everyone has their limits with this. I use samples that other people have recorded sometimes and don’t think twice about it. I look at it this way. We’re all painters. Some people buy hundreds of different colors of paint. Some people mix just a few basic colors to create any shade they want. Some people dig their pigments out of the ground themselves, grind them into powder, and make their own paints. This all impacts the final image deeply, but says nothing of the beauty inherent in the work. To each their own 
everyone should work the way that helps them make their best music, however that’s to be judged.
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200-350 tracks is a lot. But if that’s the reality in your case, you could just bus your tracks together in some meaningful way and print a single file for multiple tracks. You don’t have to render every single track just because you used multiple tracks. What matters in the end is only what comes out of the speakers, not how specifically it was made.
I’m definitely a wanker for sound design and synthesis stuff and I totally get the obsession of some people over “how” a sound/track is made. I’ve spend way way way too much time doing such weird niche processors in e.g. Reaktor, that I’ve never even heard anyone talk about anything similar, and I honestly think some of that stuff supercool and just endlessly fascinating. But even then, the only thing that really matters is what comes out of the speakers, how the music sounds. If the “infinetely linearly oversampled” multiband serial wavefolder saturation with ringmodded feedback path sounds worse than the first preset I get when opening Renoise’s basic compressor, then the latter is the only right choice, no matter how “cool” the process for getting the former was. The same thing applies to this obsession over here on the forums on using only native stuff for making the tracks. If a plugin sounds better, it is (I would even say objectively) the right choice there. And vice versa obviously. Otherwise you are confusing the fascination of the sound making process with the goal of that process. Only the destination matters here.
If you have 350 tracks that use plugins, send them to a single bus and render that and put it in your XRNS and name it “all the stuff I made with plugins”. I don’t see anything wrong with that, and it can’t be that much extra work. Or just leave your plugins on the XRNS and send it like it is. Ain’t nothing wrong with that either. The only thing that matters in the end is the music itself. Just because you’re not getting some extra points doesn’t mean you shouldn’t participate. In the last compo there was a competitor who didn’t even send their XRNS and was still very much fighting for the top places. The track was just so good. But this is the Renoise forums, so I think it’s rather reasonable to grant some extra points for competitors who specifically push Renoise to it’s limits and stand out as exemplaries of how to do extraordinarily cool stuff with Renoise. If it was, say Native Instruments Reaktor oriented forums, you should probably get extra points for exemplary/exclusive Reaktor usage and so on…
I don’t know, maybe it is too much work to render the tracks, even if you could bus, say 100 of them at a time to a single file. Only you would know if it is, since only you know your specific workflow. But I still have a hunch that you’re making this into more of a problem than it actually is. But maybe it really is such a huge work, I wouldn’t really know.
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That’s right, we’re “painters”. But we’re not paint manufacturers. It’s about composing, not about sound design. Is a guitarist using a guitar he didn’t build himself a cheater? No. Does he feel like a cheater? Surely not. There’s a reason why there are sound designers and musicians. It’s something completely different. Are you cheating because you’re using a DAW you didn’t made yourself? I assume that you know what I’m about. Personally I want to compose music and not to design sounds. Of course I change sounds depending on what I need, but I don’t design them from scratch myself. Most musicians don’t design their own sounds, neither professionals nor amateurs. Only sound designers and a couple of Renoise nerds do.
It’s extra work without any benefit and it would kill the overview, that’s why I wouldn’t do it. Besides of that it could happen that the result is different. If this competition is just about showing others the personal Renoise abilities, rendering tracks isn’t the right way to do it. But if this competition is about creating great music with Renoise, the way how you did it shouldn’t matter. In this case a wave file or MP3 should be enough, and to prove that you did it in Renoise you can deliver the xrns file, too. At least this is my opinion. 
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The benefit is that you get an XRNS that plays as is intended whether you have the plugins or not. And if you leave the plugins in the XRNS after rendering, you won’t kill the overview. So you really can have your cake and eat it too.
And I really don’t think those are exclusive goals: the compo could be about creating the coolest track you can AND about showing your Renoise skills. And hence you could get separate points for both, like has been done in a lot of compos here. 
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Ok cool, I got it. MBC is about creating a xrns file everyone can play showing the best song you can create matching a given theme, extra points for crazy classic tracker skills and/or limitations. It’s about learning Renoise stuff, the side effect is a compilation of cool songs.
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A lot of people who make electronic music are deeply into sound design, and the history of electronic composition is intimately bound to the creation of new techniques for manipulating sound. I’d argue that a lot of the innovation in various styles of electronic music isn’t melodic, or rhythmic, but aesthetic - and a big part of that - is in the innovation of new sound worlds. If that’s not what you’re into, that’s all good, but let’s not pretend that sound design and electronic music composition aren’t intimately intertwined. You select the sounds you want to use for a good reason, because they convey the aesthetic you’re after. Someone created them. I create the sounds that convey the aesthetic that I’m after, which might be something new that I haven’t heard before. One approach isn’t better than another, but I am enough of a sound design nerd (or as one of my kids calls it, a “noise geek”) to take some pride in having rarely if ever used a preset made by someone else in the nearly 30 (jesus) years I’ve been making electronic music… I don’t care how anyone else works, but I know I’m definitely not the only composer who cares deeply about custom sound design 
If I was a guitarist and a luthier, I might feel similarly about playing custom instruments I had built, and yeah, it would be totally badass to have written the DAW code, too. If I was a coder, I’d probably try, lol. But we all have our own unique interests, abilities, and limitations… again, to each their own!
The limitations around sample based production in the various options in the OP are only reflective of renoise being a big modular sampler, and to showcase those possibilities. There are options so people can choose I don’t really care how it goes, I’m not planning on voting, just going with the group will.
@sokoban I really like your idea for vocals, and would include it if I could, but the poll can’t be changed after 5 minutes of posting. If people agitate for that option, then we can go that direction.
Honestly, I just appreciate that people care enough to share their opinions about our little mutant music playzone here. Long live renoise 
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Long live Kraftwerk!
Respect for creating your own sounds from scratch in Renoise and without using any VST. It must be very time consuming, unless you’re a master in sound design. It’s kind of scientific and it takes some time and effort to get into this. It shows that you really love sound design. Of course you can be proud of these skills. You could use any synth that way if you want to. And I think you should. Different synths, different sounds. That’s why I like using different synths. And yes, I’ve got thousands of presets for different synths “someone” has created. I’m busy, my love for sound design is limited, buying presets is like buying time and there are presets for anything you can imagine (you just have to find them 
). You even don’t need to change them because there is such a large selection of sounds, but nevertheless you can easily get a completely different sound out of a preset simply by switching the waveform, the frequency, the resonance and so on, by using effects or whatever. I’m sure it’s faster to change a sound similar to what you’re looking for into the sound you’re looking for than starting from scratch. That’s why I’m the type of guy that likes to buy presets. You can leave them as they are or you can change them into your own sound. That’s what I do and I’m pretty sure most composers do it this way. But of course you’re right, there are also a lot of composers who design their own sounds from scratch and sound design and music composition are intertwined (thanks for the new word btw). But you cannot deny that there’s a reason why “sound designer” is a job. And that’s a different job than a “musician”.
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Rather interesting perspectives here, it’s really nice to hear views from people with somewhat opposing workflows.
Electronic music and the sounds that technology makes possible have always been deeply intertwined, but I think this goes way deeper than just electronic music. Yeah, Stockhausen would not have created some of his most influential pieces if tape machines would not have been invented, and we probably wouldn’t know Kraftwerk if sequencers weren’t a thing and so on. But the same principle of deep linking between technology and musical expression goes far far beyond just music made with anything that requires electricity. You think Chopin would’ve made the kind of music he made if he was born couple hundreds years earlier when the grand pianos didn’t yet have sustain pedals? No he wouldn’t have, simply because it would not have been possible. Tech sometimes revolutionises music, and music in turn makes certain paths of technological advanced more desirable than others, and hence guides where the tech heads next. Kind of a vaguely symbiotic relationship. And I really think we’ve just began to take the very first small baby steps in what computers will really mean for musical expression. What you can do to sound with computers now vs 10 years ago is already astounding. What about 500 years from now? Simply unimaginable IMO 
Regarding the “do it all by yourself” vs “just use presets” thing, I’m sort of in the middle ground here. I used to do a lot of theater sound design, and having a large collection of sounds ready to go was not only convenient, but almost a necessity there. The director might suddenly want a completely different kind of a sound for a scene during a rehearsal and you can’t really start to synthesize or layer something from scratch in that kind of situation. You just quickly dig into your sample collection and pull something up, and then maybe refine it more later when you have the time.
Doing that kind of work has made me appreciate a large sample collection in multiple ways. Firstly it gives me access to sounds from unbelievably talented people who might approach sound design from a totally different angle, with totally different equipment, and hence make sounds I would never ever come up with. Secondly it makes life way more easier sometimes: if I want a sound of, say a train passing by, I can just dig in and get a that (vs taking my field recorder and going out to spend a day just recording trains). And thirdly I view it as raw materials for all kinds of resampling and de-/re-constructing. When I get my granular Reaktor arsenal out, I really want to have some cool samples also ready to go, easily and without any fuzz. I just want to push the record button, turn some knobs and get lost in cool sounds. Editing comes only after all that fun stuff. 
But that being said, I also have a small collection of circuit bent toys I took apart and bent myself. I have self-made piezo-noise boxes, lots of self-made Reaktor stuff, SunVox metamodules, binaural recordings and so on. I completely get the satisfaction and pride one gets from using just self-made instruments/samples. It feels really good when you can say “I made everything in this from the scratch”. And that way you can really taylor your sounds to fit your aesthetic preferences from the get go. My best friend always says I usually make “crunchy” and “wet” sounds, and I totally agree! 
And when I make the kind of sounds that inspire me even as just sounds without any context, they are super easy to fit into any project I make, since they already have an aesthetic flavour I like. That’s why making your own presets is also so useful (although I don’t do that too much myself).
So I think both styles of working have their advantages and one is certainly not better than the other. It’s a preference thing in the end. I also think it’s an important point @TNT has about painters vs paint manufacturers. I’d put it this way: I’d rather not have Steinway pianos be made by pianists themselves, but rather have one group of people focus solely on the art of making the best possible pianos, and another group of people focus solely on playing those pianos as beautifully as humanly possible. That way everyone collectively can have best of both worlds, and not a bunch of “jack of all trades, master of none” -situations. And yes, I know this is a huge simplification, but I bet you get my jist. And I think same logic could be applied to virtual instruments. I could never even dream of putting something like Renoise or Vital together by myself, but I can use them and try to master them to the best of my ability when making sounds and music.
Sorry for rambling a bit, I just really find this an interesting subject.
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I would say one defined VSTi (cross platform, opensource) plus a defined sample pack. Those Audio Tournament compos were very nice. One sample or smallest size imho is boring, since there is not even a replayer for Renoise so you can’t put the result onto a bootblock… On the other hand, an EFI cracktro / virus would be very funny.
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so far, mutant cats and one sample challenge are tied for first. two weeks to keep voting
@SimulatedZen I think we should community curate a sample pack for MBC 15 in 2023. That way there will be time to pull together some really high-quality source material for next year’s MBC. sound good?
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I agree. I’ll get it started after MBC14 is done. 
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Awesome. Maybe the winner of MBC 14 can choose the theme for the sample pack (if they want there to be a theme), and everyone who wants to contribute samples, xrnis, fx chains etc. can use that as inspiration
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