Mtldnb Article On Renoise 1.8

General Discussion
1

I’m looking to replace this page with Renoise 1.8 but i’d rather not cut and paste a pile of hype and fluff.

http://www.mtldnb.com/index.php?name=News&…icle&sid=10

Renoise Team, can you kindly answer the following questions ?

  1. Based on registered users and free demo downloads, what is the estimated user base of Renoise? Would you say that the user base growing? Given the death of many trackers before it, is the Renoise user base manageable for years to come?

  2. According to the Wikipedia entry for Renoise: “Given its relatively smaller userbase, the sense of collective ownership from this community is strong.” Ownership is a strong word. As a developer, do you feel this statement is true? Please explain.

  3. The “tracker way” of making music using a personal computer pre-dates that of most everything out there. What I mean is, back in the day, if you were using a computer in an (analog) studio that meant you had a setup that cost hundred of thousands of dollars. In contrast, demo/warez scene composers pioneered the use of personal computers as the “stuio-in-the-box” while being chastised by the professional industry who considered this some sort of joke. As computers got more powerful and more accessible to a less “nerdy” crowd, the “studio-in-a-box” became the norm. Along with this came interfaces that look absolutely nothing like a tracker. 1.8 bridges the gap between these interfaces in many respects, yet remains true to the roots of tracking. Ten years from now, do you see Renoise turning into some sort of Fruity Loops? What makes a tracker a tracker, and why is it relevant today?

  4. Why Renoise? Why not some VST or some other project? Why do you do this?

  5. Of the “famous people” you know who use Renoise, can you mention a few that make you proud to be working on the application and why?

Thanks.

2

Well, as a Renoise Teamer I can answer some questions from my own perspective and give my own motivations, but most questions are actually directed towards the Dev-team and not the Renoise team.

(by the way, your link pops up a page about Reason 3.0 and not Renoise :P)

  1. I don’t know the estimated usersbase, i know there is a steady growth of a certain amount of people that register every day because it has been told, and that’s all i shall mention about it. About the death of many trackers: This scene already lives for quite some years and we have a good and helpfull community existing out of registered and unregistered users that help eachother out.
    For me this is one of the motivations to support Renoise in a more direct way besides registering the product. As long as there is a steady growth of registrations and you have a good community that helps you out with your product support i personally consider this as a good base of product development and continuation. Considering if you are a developer in your real life profession that this fact helps extra and it helps extra if you had a living by developing for a company that produces professional studio software.
    So far the only spoilers (leaks and warez sharing folks) didn’t seem to have too much influence on product development, simply because the registration price is still fair enough for most people as it is still being registered. Renoise grows because this circle of mutual respect keeps spinning.

  2. A tracker is just a different type of sequencer that had always been a good tool for the skilled yet unwealthy musician throughout the past two decades. Ten years from now is a lot of time to look ahead to and when brainstorming on improvements i notice most improvements get based upon things that lack in Renoise but still do not change the basic workflow of tracking much, only enhance it.
    It is likely that this spreadsheet type of sequencing will never get out of the concept as for this, Renoise has too many users that are somewhat dependant upon the workflow of this application.
    I don’t exclude the possibility that some kind of pianoroll or arranger will be implemented as an extra option but not as replacement.

  3. I am personally satisfied and proud if any new user feels content in using Renoise regardless of their status. Each Renoise user has a different background and motivation for using it. One may use it as their main studio tool, someone else likes it for sequencing percussion lines to use the result in a more expensive sequencer (for whatever reason). Renoise offers any user different choices of how and why to use it and because the price makes it very affordable, you actually can never loose your money on this one, wether you want to use it as your complete start-to-end production tool or wether you just want to use it for sub-production. A large group of famous musicians that would independantly from eachother, like to advocate Renoise would probably a very good reason to be proud on developing Renoise, but personally for me it is the respect of the community that counts and drives me to keep going and keep spending time on my part of the job.

3

Yes, I want to replace that page with an article on Renoise which I will write myself.

Thank you for taking the time to answer, I appreciate it. I will wait to see if other members of the team will answer and compile everything together and post it on that page.

Cheers.

4

Hehe… I wrote that! :P …And it’s the truth. You only have to loiter around these forums for a while and you’ll see what I mean. As long as the team continue with the attitude of graciousness then a community will exist around it to reward and protect it. I see this as a very necessary stand against corporatism and dehumanization.

When I see some cubase devotees flying their flag it’s usually with a passion that attempts to mask their regret that they shelved out too much money for a program they don’t really feel comfortable about but are too frightened to try anything else. I don’t see that type of behavior around here.

5

Anyone else want to write something?

If not, that’s cool and i’ll write something based on what I have so far.

6

Not a renoise team member hope you don’t mind ;)

  1. For me it’s all about the workflow.

I started just before I sold my Amiga with Octamed (I belive it was) and continued with Scream Tracker 1 on the PC in -90/91 :)
At the time I couldn’t shell out the amount of money that were required for synths and so on.
It was also a good way to learn since you could download other people songs and see how they were made.
The first synth I bought was the VirusB a couple of years back and at the time the trackers available with good midi support was from slim to none.
So I ended up trying Cubase, hated it :D
The main thing that was really irritating was they way you edited notes/velocity etc.
Within a tracker, just stand over the item you wanted to change, bang done.
In Cubase, double click the “midi track” locate the note you wanted to change referencing the pianoroll and time bars.
In a tracker the note is clearly listed straight away (for the ones used to it), you have the highlights to go by and also the row number instead of a picture of piano keys rotated 90 degrees (who invented that one).
Also it got really really anoying unless you had a high resolution display.
If you had notes of the same instrument but the octaves were to far from eachother to fit on screen at the same time, you had to scroll up/down all the time.

7

Sounds like a nightmare, I doubt about the keyboard existing in ten years. I would not compare Renoise with Cubase. There are millions of $ behind it. We’ve got millions of scene-souls behind the tracking. It’s more like about an art to me. It’s about how personal music making can be as a process. It’s about being inspired with details you can put out but not features that distort your ideas. It’s about n_of_movements/result factor. I would not go for Cubase’s features, I would overstep them with everything they ever had in their heads. Remember the WW2, It’s about T-34 tank.
If you’re interested in my ideas I see future Renoise as an extreme creative tool with extremely big community and extremely flexible sound design platform.

8

eeeek, cubase !

:)

mlon

9
10

FIRST DRAFT, SUGGESTIONS WELCOME

ASC, Enduser, Soundmurderer, Venetian Snares, the list of broken beat innovators using this application goes on. In beta since September 2005, Renoise 1.8 is on the horizon. RC1, recently having been released for free to the general public, boats over 100 improvements and new features compared to the previous version, Renoise 1.5.2.

“For me it’s all about the workflow” -Haplo

Renoise is rooted in a very different approach to making music than other more expensive sequencers on the market today. This approach is known as Tracking. Tracking entails a spreadsheet type of sequencing methodology that has been around for over two decades now.

“I see this as a very necessary stand against corporatism and dehumanization.” -Foo?

Historically, if you were using computers in an (analog) studio it probably meant you had a setup that cost hundred of thousands of dollars. In contrast, demo/warez scene composers pioneered the use of personal computers as the “studio-in-the-box” while being chastised by the professional industry who considered this some sort of joke. As computers became more powerful and more accessible to a less nerdy crowd, the “studio-in-a-box” became the norm. Along with this came interfaces that look absolutely nothing like a tracker. Renoise 1.8 bridges the gap between these interfaces in many respects, yet remains true to the roots of tracking.

"We’ve got millions of scene-souls behind tracking. It’s more about art to me. It’s about how personal music making can be a process. It’s about being inspired with details you can put out but not features that distort your ideas. " -Zed

The Renoise community, the Renoise team, and the Renoise developers are a tightly knit group. This camaraderie and symbiosis makes the Renoise Forums an excellent support mechanism. With this grass roots approach, it is not uncommon to see a discussion of an idea make it’s way into the application.

“Every Renoise user has a different background and motivation for using it. One may use it as their main studio tool, someone else likes it for sequencing percussion lines to use the result in a more expensive sequencer. Whether you want to use it as your complete start-to-end production tool or whether you just want to use it for sub-production, Renoise offers every user different choices of how and why to use it. As the price is very affordable, you can’t every really go wrong with your money on this one. For me it is the respect of the community that counts and drives me to keep going.” -vV (Team Renoise)

If you’re looking for decent example tracks, sort through the beatbattle results. Not a whole lot of drum & bass, but several noteworthy break styled tracks to get you going in the right direction. The best way to learn is to load up a track you like and play around with it. Oh and:

http://wiki.renoise.com/wiki/

Happy tracking.

11

It seems I slightly got out of quote, English is far away from my native language, but there is another version with the sense I wanted to translate:

“It’s about how personal (i.e unique) your music making can be as a process.”

But I like the article. Quotes without a long features list leaves a good feeling. Actually, I didn’t expect being quoted in the article, I could say a lot more about Renoise. Thought I’m officially “alpha tester” I feel connection with Renoise and it’s dev team more deep. It’s not just because I’ve suggested a lot, it’s not because that a lot of my suggestions have been implemented, it’s mainly because it’s quite easy to suggest to me, for some reason I see clearly how to make a perfect tracker out of Renoise. Too sad I live damn far from a proper civilization, otherwise I’d be a proper Renoise team member with no doubt.

12

Nice one Conner. Let us know when it gets published. Screenshots?

13

Good article Conner_Bw! :)

14

I like the article. Didn’t know that Soundmurderer was a renoise user tho. :blink:

15

In regards to the above, see: http://www.dogsonacid.com/showthread.php?threadid=461555

I’ll clean up the article (fix the zed quote, add screenshots, minor spelling mistakes) and post it on MTLDNB later tonight.

Thanks everyone.

16

Published:

http://www.mtldnb.com/index.php?name=News&…icle&sid=33

Thanks everyone.

17

“In beta since September 2005”… Shouldn’t that be 2006?

18

Fixed, thanks.

19

hey foo! really enjoyed reading your blogs. interesting stuff, and well written. specially the part about sequence synthesis, whereas i agree 100% with you.

cheers m8,
.x

20

Fanx Mr. X, although I have to be careful not to be too much of a journalist and concentrate on music. Blogging is a good thing to do at work when bored.

Conner, does Mtldnb get lotsa traffic?