New Funding Idea For Renoise

Ideas & suggestions
1

Hello,

I don’t really have much of an idea of the renoise teams income, but I’m guessing that due to the (I would guess) small market for trackers, I’d say that after launch and initial hype, sales tend to level off fairly quickly? Stuff like launching on a new platform (eg, the new mac version), will probably see a big boost of registered versions, but these things must be fairly rare… I could also be wrong here, but I’m thinking that you guys will be putting most resources into the area that will pull you in the most cash. This might mean that those of us who registered a while ago, aren’t really seeing many major updates…

well, i didn’t just come here to moan about it, I just wanted to suggest a new way for people to show their support for renoise, and help make all the requested features happen sooner. I was thinking that you could maybe have a voluntary upgrade fee for each new update that is made available. I certainly wouldn’t mind throwing an extra $10 in if an update contained features that I was looking forward to. You could even make updates available say a month early to those willing to pay for it? I think it should definitely remain voluntary, as i’m sure there will be people out there who feel they’ve paid enough with their registration fee already, but I think there’s also be a whole bunch of renoise fanatics who would happily throw in a bit extra to keep development going full speed.

What do other people think? And renoise team - would extra cash really help to get us new features faster, or would it not make any difference?

Eddie

–
www.bovaflux.co.uk

2

I cannot answer to your question because I’m not into code developing of Renoise; all I can say is that, if you feel like making a sort of donation, you can get a shirt, for example

3

I think somehow this wouold be a great idea— however it works, I’d def be willing to donate money to see certain features included… I would definetly donate money to see stuff like au support developed, things like that… tie up all those loose ends that people are begging for… but not nessicarily for thing that are just a little too overly ambitious- I’m sooo stocked that we are getting a mixer view and a sampling function built in. But I agree… the only thing that I would see this not is due to the fact that these devs have normal live and this isn’t their soul carreer… it’s done when they have the time to do it, even if they had a million bucks, they might not have the time to utilise it ( I sure wouldn’t- I’d be out and busy spending the cash :lol: )

4

I would definately be up for donating the odd few quid if it meant the dev team could spend more time on Renoise.

I don’t like the idea of buying the t-shirt, nice as it may be, just to get some money to them - I’d rather just give 'em the cash.

What do you think devs?

5

I can imagine some modules that would be supported like ReWire would cost extra to cover the expenses of the licenses that the ReWire producers request.
There are features not implemented because the authors behind the technology ask money for it and in some cases a lot.

Implementing full Mp3 embedded support would make Renoise a lot more expensive only because Frauhenhofer wants money for every single sold application license of Renoise.

And if only 50 people or so want that technology, the implementation is a waste of time because it doesn’t make it up for the effort and you don’t want to ask all the other few hundred users to pay for something they don’t want.

6

Quoted from the sight:

"I’m a software developer - can I include ReWire in my programs?

Yes, ReWire is a free piece of technology. Propellerhead Software will issue licenses to companies in the audio or music industry interested in creating commercial ReWire applications, free of charge. Find out more here."

http://www.propellerheads.se/technologies/…ction=mainframe

:P

Mp3 is garbage anyway- no need to work with it… it’s ok for mp3 players and dj sets where people are too drunk to be audiophiles, so who cares?

7

Then there’s the bit about having to have a proper, registered company. :)

8

madtracker has rewire support, and that program only costs 40 euro :)

get that guy from revisit on the renoise team! even if that would slow down production speed with brooks law in mind, I’m sure in the long run it be worth it.

9

Here’s a funding idea: Hold a compo with a RNS licence as the first few prizes!

Or, even better, sponsor an existing compo, like SDcompo with a licenced copy or two.
Helps spread the word, inserts $$ to RNS development, increase number of registered users.

Anybody say ‘weee’?

10

Obviously I cannot speak for anyone on the Renoise team, but speaking as someone who gets emailed almost every day about a very similar topic - people asking me if donations would speed up the creation of a Mac version of my Glitch VST - I can say that no, donations would not really help. With me it’s not a question of money, it’s simply a question of time. A few donations will not change the fact that I have a full time job to work and several other obligations in my life besides programming. It’s extremely difficult for me to fit all these new things - learning C++, learning about OSX, learning about Audio Units - into an already busy schedule. I would imagine that it’s a pretty similar situation for Taktik and the other guys.

The gesture of giving a donation is, I’m sure, greatly appreciated, but looking at it from a realistic point of view, a few donations which will level off quite quickly - just as actual sales do - might provide enough cash to feed a developer for a month, but it will definitely not be a viable source of income for much longer than that. Perhaps a month of constant work on Renoise is all it takes to brainstorm a few big new features but there are still some pretty big obstacles to consider. Is Taktik supposed to quit his job and live on donation money for a month to do these new features and then… get a new job? Hope that more donations come in so he can work for another month? Eat into his own personal savings to continue work? Etc.

It’s a very difficult place to be - stuck between being an independant developer who does the programming in his spare time, and actually turning the project into your full time job. In my opinion, for money to ever be truely effective in helping the developer create these big, new features, it has to be a rather substantial amount of money - enough so that the developer CAN actually quit his full time job and survive for at least 6 months without worries, giving him enough time to stay on his feet and really make something happen. It should really be even more than that just to be safe, but we’re talking about a lot of cash here and, let’s be honest, it’s never going to happen through donations alone. As many of us would gladly donate a bunch of our own money to help, it would still never be enough to have a serious, long-term impact. Usually when these things make the transition from independant, part-time project to full-time project/business, it’s with the help of an investor or something like that, but that’s a realm I personally know little-to-nothing about.

Anyway, so what can we do? Well, in my opinion the best thing we can do at the moment is to just show our support, buy a Renoise t-shirt once in a while so Taktik and crew can have a beer :) , give constructive feedback, and most of all be patient. Good things come to those who wait, so they say!

</2cents>

11

If someone gets the rent and electric bill, I’ll pay for food on the weekends. I’m readily assuming here that he’ll be too busy coding to eat on regular weekdays. :)

Even if there was a system for donations, with a target sum that needed to be met every month, I think most of us realise that it’s not possible at the moment. Maybe somewhere down the line, when Renoise has a broader appeal, it might be more realistic.

12

i think i would pay for a subscription, some decent sum every month.
with subscription, it could totally f**** over warez crews! an force warez users to break down an pay for a registeration!
then on top of it, the devs would know how many active users they have, an with those users, could come a different way of working on things, a new way to hold the reigns of the future.
tho for that to work, the devs would be swamped!
if i were to pay for a subscription, i would certainly want to be knowing that current technology is being utilized.

such as OSC!!@ :D

ive really slacked off at promoting renoise to ppl, its partly because i finally realized that renoise isnt really a DAW, i think in order for it to be a force to be reckoned with it needs to excell beyond the top sequencers and have things that the top sequencers dont have. or have not implemented yet.(like OSC!)

i still love you guys, girls, geniuses, & most of all Renoise!

13

This seems like an interesting idea. Although I am broke at the moment, :D there is already a voting system for new features in place. If that system could be modified to let you donate to potential features then users could put their money where their mouths are and donate for their favorite new features. :)

I don’t know what kind of costs are involved in developing state of the art tracking software so I don’t know how effective this would really be. Some problems might be a particular feature unavoidably taking a long time even though millions of dollars have been donated or users squeeling for faster release of their favorite feature after donating a total of $2 dollars and $.50 cents. Balancing this system for reasonable expectations might prove to be a challenge but it’s an interesting idea. :yeah:

Thanks for the plug Sagosen! :lol:

I didn’t think a lot of warez ‘users’ pirated Renoise. I have no problem recommending the free demo of Renoise to people since it’s practically fully functional. Anyone who is serious enough about making music, I’ve found, is happy to pickup a legit copy at it’s reasonable price and support the further development of Renoise.

It’d be interesting to know how many Registered Renoisers there are out there. :o

14

dblue gets a clap from me, bravo.

15

One right here…

I agree with dblue, no funding scheme is really going to help. I think the message at the end of the day is: Be Patient. There two things that will help you to be patient:

  1. Go make some music.
  2. Realise the Renoise is not the be all and end all. If you want midi this or audio that, then go USE those programs and realise you’re no cheating on your girlfriend.

For example, I love using EnergyXT with Renoise. I love time-stretching in Ableton, and I love the audio multi-track in Audition and to an extent Cubase. Renoise is my main tool, but I’ll use all these progs and much more, per my creative needs. That’s what it’s all about.

Besides, if you think it cannot be done in Renoise, many times I would beg to differ because there are lots of very creative ways around problems that this program allows for.

Except perhaps having FFFF patterns. :unsure:

16

You’re welcome! Haven’t been active in your compo in a while (due to lack of time/energy) so I contribute in any way I can, hehe.

But about the other stuff, we’ve discussed donations for faster development of certain aspects before, and I’m pretty sure the coders were appalled about the idea, that 1 user with more $$ should get his/her features compared to many others who can’t afford the big cheese. A majority of tracker users don’t have that much money to spend, it all spawned from freeware/shareware/extremely cheap software solutions, not full fledged studio sequencers that cost your right arm. We (or at least me) who couldn’t afford the expensive solutions for making music when we started out got into trackers, because they were free and easy to operate without any musical equipment outside the computer. I know it’s evolved now and users leave Cubase for Renoise blah blah, but I know I’d be pissed to be bought out for some rich kid wanting his fantasy about nibbles in Renoise to come true.

I say let’s keep being patient, the developers have delivered gold so far, Fruityloops made it, I’m sure Renoise can too!

17

some random thoughts by me :

(If I refer to taktik here I actually mean the whole renoise team, sorry that I am too lazy to point that out all the time)

–

I guess that we all agree that one-time donations are a good way to show our appreciation, but not really a way to speed up the development. Ofcourse we could start something like “provide a nicer vacation for taktik (and the rest of the dev team)” or something like this by donating money so that taktik is f.e. able to go to some more distant location then the “mecklenburger seenplatte” on his normal summer-vacation and relax abit more , but the point is that you can’t buy time with the amount of money we are talking about. I don’t know what taktik is currently earning per month (and I dont want to know) but I am not sure if its really possible to gather atleast 300 people willing to pay 10¤ per month for years to make taktik

-quit his job (that he loves, I guess)
-be ready to deal with the hassle of explaining the german tax-office what exactly he is doing
-be ready to argue with people that pay 10¤ per month and start to expect things on a much higher level

–

they are sponsoring demo-parties already. I won a renoise license at last years evoke and gave that away to amove because he hadn’t bought renoise yet.

–

I wrote this some time ago, some more developers would be useful maybe, but again if people haven’t contacted the dev-team about helping out yet I guess it would be a little bit strange if they did now that this whole “money” thing comes up. Also I know that it’s even alot work to comment/organize and explain your code to other people so they can work on it.

–

I dont think that there are still people from the “scene” that don’t know about renoise, honestly. RNS is meanwhile an accepted format at every major demo-party, there have been reviews and links all over the place and so on. Maybe there are still possible users out there that don’t know about Renoise, but I guess these may be people that once started on trackers on Amgia and PC and switched to Cubase/Logic long time ago, and I am not really sure they want to go back or want to switch to an entirely different program.
What I think however is that there are users that don’t know about or don’t use the community-options here (the forum), I was at breakpoint and spoke to about 12 people having renoise running on their PCs, only two of them (ptrance and keith303) were active on this board.

–

And on the whole business thing :
It really depends on how taktik defines this renoise project for himself. We all know he is mainly working for ableton and I read somewhere that he basically started renoise for himself. Still the question is how “serious” he takes renoise (and that is not something I judge about).
If its a hobby he does beside his work, then thats okay and all I can do is hope that he has enough time to work on renoise and hope that he implements the features I want and I know I cant force that in any way.
If he likes to step the development up and bring renoise to other levels then in my opinion there would be some ways to do that.
I was honestly surprised about revisit, this “tracking vst”, because that is something that imho renoise could have been a long time ago. Make a VST version and provide a tracker-like sequencer for Cubase/Logic. As I said, I guess there are still alot of people around that once started with trackers, now use piano-roll-programs but still remember advantages of trackers and may be happy to use that. that is a “market” that is out there. so, imho if the renoise-team really wants to get more users the only way is to convert renoise from a fully standalone application to a plugin-capable program that can be used within cubase etc. maybe as a “stripped-down” version or something.

another way would be to market renoise as a tool for loop-creation for ableton live and similar programs, especially drumloops and similar.

but lets face it : you wont find an awful lot of people willing to let go of cubase/logic to switch to renoise. won’t happen.

–

well, those are the things I can think about at the moment.

18

Thanks man, it’s very appreciated! I’m kind of enjoying the extra tracking time in this round. :D Hope your able to join us again soon!

Re: New Funding Idea
A lot of good points were made about this donation model and I’m inclined to agree it probably isn’t really a feasible idea. Personally I’m very happy with the current feature set of Renoise so being patient isn’t too difficult for me. I don’t really push Renoise to it’s limits though so users who do are probably more anxious for new features. I’m excited about the new feature from bb4 though! :w00t: New Renoise releases are always fun but in the meantime I’ll be using and recommending Renoise without any hesitation. :walkman:

19

Well, donations would at the end not help producing more features. Not with the way Renoise currently works. Thats fore sure. The time I have/want to have for Renoise is spend on Renoise. Extra money would only put another extra stress factor into this.

I would in contrary fear, that people start to think that they can buy features. Heck that’s really not the way to go. This even scares me a little bit and would only result in disappointment on both sides: “Hey, I have paid 100 bucks for this nifty feature! Why is it not implemented?!!???!!”.

About pushing features: We are the only software group (at least I don’t know others who do it like this) who asks their users what they would like to see in future. That’s all we can do. We are not a 40 people driven software company that spits out new fabolus releases every half a year (including a bunch of new fabolus bugs: “Yes, but we where stressed!”). But thats exactly what makes this project so lovely. Do you really need all these features or do you simply want them because DAW XYZ has them, and your friend told you that with the new pianoroll with the 10 extra shiny buttons everything sounds even crispier than ever before?

If you want to see more Renoise features in future, then just wait and make good Music in between. That’s the best advertisement and support that you can give to this project. Renoise constantly evolved over time. I currently see no reason why this should stop tomorrow.

And about Ableton: Yes, I used to work there for quite a long time, but quit a few months ago, because I simply didn’t liked the way it started to be there. Now I’m doing school stuff again, running another software project, and enjoying doing art and depressive, distorted, crazy music again (hopefully more and more in future). But that’s personal stuff which has nearly nothing to do with Renoise…

20

Nice reply Eduard. You are totally right about the things you described.

Renoise is a well designed program and the support is awesome. I’m proud what we have achieved with Renoise until now. I know for sure it will be even better in the near future.

Keep up the good work!!