New It-alien Song: "breath"

a new song by me has just been released;
download it here
(10’30", OGG format, 9700KB)

You can also download the smaller XRNS version here
(10’30", XRNS format, 1500KB)

Lastly, a streamed version can be preheared here

A space rock song, entirely made and mastered in Renoise using no VST plugins.

Awesome! And very educative to look at the RNS :).

Your tracking is always impressive. It’s like you know all the tricks of Renoise and trackers in general. Amazing.

Argh! What are doing releasing this in 96khz? I had to manually convert it just to play it!

Listening on crap speakers on my old computer atm… Love this tune. Really strong and tasteful use of colourful vst effects, which you didn’t do so much in the past in an obvious way. The middle build is very groovy and spacey in the way I like. …And then it just keeps float out… and out… and out.

first of all, thanks for your enthusiastic feedback!

then, I’m sorry for releasing the song at 96Khz: it’s entirely my fault and I’ve already updated the song on my site. Thanks for reporting, I’m always a misterious combination of genius and stupidity :rolleyes:

And modest, too :D

This song:

  • does not have a recognisable theme
  • is noticably divided into parts (shouldn’t it be a couple of songs then?)
  • is very Tangerine Dream-like, especially the riff-like synth arpeggios
  • is not 4/4 which is very refreshing, I like that
  • is great as a background tune while I’m coding or reading
  • although some of the effects are distracting
  • reminds me of Sky Moves Sideways by Porcupine Tree

To sum up, I like it, although I guess connecting the different parts in a more intent way would be a great advantage. I like the TD-like style of it but I’d like to have a lead melody somewhere. You know, It-Alien, what am I supposed to whistle along? ;)

Not every song in the world is made to be a whistled along, you know ;).

Dear It-Alien
I downloaded this and extracted it, but when I try to open the XML I see the following error:

‘F:\It-Alien_Breath_OGG\Song.xml’ is not a Renoise XML file!

I tried to open it using Renoise 1.8.0 RC2

what should I do?

Ashkan Asgary,

try downloading the song again, most likely the has been a connection problem during download; I’ve tried downloading it and had no problems loading the song.

Dear It-Alien, I did what you told me, I downloaded again and I’m sure there is no problem during download, also all the samples are downloaded with no problem… but again when I try to open the XML I encounter the same error: “…is not a Renoise XML file!”. Can it be some kind of incompatibility with my system? My system specs are:

CPU: Pentium 4 2.0 GHz
Motherboard: Iwill P4ES
Memory: 1 GB DDR
VGA: GeForce 4 MX440
Sound: M-Audio Audiophile 2496
OS: Windows XP media center edition SP 2 / DirectX 9.0c

could you please email the song at it-alien@renoise… ?

just to check if I can open the copy you have downloaded without problems.

My system is almost similar to yours, and I generally doubt this could be an hardware issue.
Also, DDspeed did listen to the XRNS version, so this means that something weird is happening on your side

I have a feeling that Ashkan extracted the .xrns file and is trying ot open it’s internal xml file in Renoise.

Ashkan: If it’s true, than you either needlessly uncompress the xrns file or have a misconfigured unpacker-app.

DDSpeed and Bantai,
Your posts gave me the clue what I should do. The file which It-Alien has introduced for download has a .ZIP extension (if you try to download it you’ll see), and it was natural to be opened with WinZip or WinRAR, and Renoise could not recognize it as a compatible format. I used DOS command prompt and changed the extension to .XRNS and now it works, the file has been an .xrns with a .zip extension!
Any way I thank you for your useful support.

And to It-Alien: Great as usual :) Your songs are all Renoise tutorials for me.

no this is not quite right: all XRNS files are basically renamed ZIP files, so they have ZIP format and XRNS extension.

You can use WinRAR to open XRNS file and extract song and samples data separately, but of course you must not do it in order to listen to the song.

…and thanks for your comment :)

Yes, of course you’re right, but this time it was different, I myself wondered why. It had ZIP format and ZIP extension too! When I save my songs their extension is XRNS not ZIP, of course the format is a ZIP of the original XML and samples. Now if I change the XRNS extension to ZIP by command prompt, renoise will no longer open the file, this is just how your song was after download. Any way it was a great song and I needed to see the techniques used, so I insisted to have the xrns. Again thanks It-Alien.

Great track as usual, lot’s of variations and ideas! Thanks for sharing.

Hey It-alien. I can’t download your latest song. When I rightclick the link in your profile all I get is a webpage called RENAME.ME. If I leftclick I get to a webpage and nothing happens.

splajn, many thanks for reporting this! I’ve changed the PHP version running on the server which hosts my website, and seems that something has gone wrong with migration in the PHP code compatibility. Now everything should work, except for rightclicking will still give you a .php file, but this is a problem on renoise.com side