True words, it pretty much sums up this discussion for me. Everything needs to be reconsidered each time something new is introduced, but at the same time, existing usage patterns should be protected and/or improved.
Now, 2.7 also happened to be the result of a team of developers that went from 1 or 2 to 3-4 people in the same period, so personally I think you can attribute the less-than-elegant instrument panel to “growing pains”. Not that it shouldn’t be taken seriously, but one has to acknowledge the fact that there is a problem before one can do something about it.
Well, it does a pretty good job on full vocal recordings. It gives me the opportunity to set entry points without having to destroy the sample and in case i made a mistake i can adjust markers easily.
This is why i sometimes wish renoise would move on to another more popular sample format (sfz?). There would already be established libraries and more value for renoise users in creating new ones.
I do realize that any format that is well used now of days is so feature laden that it seems a bit unfair to expect a good player and editor for it at the meager price of renoise. Especially when any other daw would break it apart from the software and sell it as a plug in for a price that would buy enough copies of renoise for all your friends.
with regards to instruments and keyzones, these 2 tools by Kmaki might come in helpful for adding some non-existent functionality:
I have always thought that those velocity layers and stuff like that are waste of time. We can’t really compete with Kontakt here. Nobody cares about building those huge instruments anyway. People just want to take a sample, and make it sound cool. That’s been the idea of trackers for a long time. More attention should be directed at that approach.
Let’s be honest here, nobody is ever going to create reasonable amount of big multiinstruments for renoise, EVER. Even if the sampler is going to be upgraded 10 times and is functionally similar to competitors. Because this is not what people who use trackers care for anyway and there is always going to be larger libraries for Kontakt etc.
personally, I have found very useful to record multilayered drumkits from VST plugins using the automatic recorder. others may found other ways to use that feature.
however, and for many different reasons, the following sentence will probably still remain true:
Sorry Suva but it’s comments like that which make me which make me wish Lili’s trolling hadn’t caused the removal of the Minus button fpor rating posts.
Sample layering and envelopes per sample/zone are a couple of the most common requests I’ve seen since starting to use Renoise and I don’t think such oft-requested features should just be ignored and brushed under the carpet forever!
well, i have not been ‘on the scene’ for a very long time, but from what i’ve seen, the definition of ‘people who use trackers’ has changed a bit over the years. afaik, trackers used to be the domain of people making chiptunes and rave-music and stuff like that, and it was all very much underground. Renoise has done its part in changing all that a bit i think, and helped pull the tracker out of obscurity. as a result, loads of different people use Renoise now for loads of different genres of music.
i feel your above comment is more applicable 10 years back or something than it is right now.
Yeah, well, you share the thoughts of one group of people that indeed think like this, but i’m not one of them.
And yes i use those velocity layers because i want to have a set of instruments containing a natural sounding including some natural behavior around it.
You can’t accomplish this with one layer and one layer group unfortunately. And i’m not interested in purchasing every commercial sample pack out there that does the job.
Specially not since i have synth-plugins that simulate a very good aproach where i can get as much required dynamics from it as i desire.
I don’t know if nobody is ever going to create a reasonable amount of multisample instruments for Renoise but i don’t doubt that people who do, might not be very generous to share these libraries.
There is currently not really a way to protect these libraries from unwanted sharing whereas Kontakt has the ability to allow commercial protected libraries.
Sorry i don’t agree on this matter. Some won’t care but there are definately a lot of people having asked for this.
the good thing about velocity layers is that you can resample vsti’s very deeply, - this may be very usefull for drums,
but I agree thast renoise main advantage regarding to samples, should be focusing on one sample that you can process/controll either offline (by processing through plugins) or through sequencer directly,
trackers where always very strong in this area and they depended heavily on samples, now how cool would it be to do some “processing” via the tracker commands, using the original idea of tracker commands in
a modern powerfull way,
like every instrument could have built in filter/lofi machine/ flanger etc, that we now use as dsp device, and you could control these mechanisms through tracker commands -
this is of course now available through adding dsp processors, but it’s not exactly what i’m trying to describe,
if new renoise instruments happened to be this powerfull, if renoise focused on deeper sequencer/sampler relation and you could possibly be able to control loop points in sample live for example,
i think it would become extremely powerfull while following the tracker approach…
now in case renoise had this kind of powerfull instrument enviroment, - resampling vstis into this instrument would be actually even more important and combination would be orgasmic 
The multilayer and everything new is cool, its just a shame some basic functionality, layout and
workflow logic suffered because of it in the 2.7 upgrade.
But the multilayer rules for drumlayering, especially for live recording.
In previous versions we had to drag all the layers around in the pattern area,so big +1 for the multilayering.
The slicer is good too, but it all feels kind as a test version and not as final release in comparison to earlier upgrades.
This IS a preparation for future instrument upgrades. The current instrument structuring was made this way to make it possible to do the instrument section more modular in the future. So, yes. You can say it’s half finished. But we decided that this was an OK compromise for the time being. Adding the slicer and new mapping gives you new things impossible to do before. The rest might seem like a step back for some. But it was just made this way to be fully backward compatible and future proof.
With this restructuring it enables us to develop the instrument section further step by step.
This was impossible to do with the (VERY) old fixed structuring of the instrument section we had before.
In the end we need to find a good balance between how flexible stuff should be, and how easy it should be is to use.
There is a lot of things planned for the xnri. And things will improve for sure. We just have to be patient and wait
This was clearly stated with the 2.7 release. But seem to be forgotten already 
I would find it more usefull to have sample section straight under the instrument section, with the whole list of samples there, in place of advanced pattern edit operations - i think it would make no harm to move advanced edit
to the left end of the window, - we already have arranger there, so no harm would be done, and the whole area under the instruments could be used for listing samples
I don’t like that renoise instruments and vst plugins share the same space, i also think that adding instruments via instrument setting is clumsy, instead i think it would be much more natural to have small " + " in the instrument section for adding vst instruments (at the begining or end of the line) it would also be nice to be able to change scale of instruments/samples section in this way, either making long instrument list or on the other hand , one instrument with long list of samples included in it, for better editing (with the same wideness)
this is what would work much better in current enviroment,
if you allow me some more brainstorming, i could imagine renoise loosing the lower frame completely - or having the mixer faders with dsp plugins corresponding to every track there instead, with the ability to hide up/lower frame , you could track and use the dsp devices connected with the track easier, imagine that you want to control filter from dsp chain , you would move to the effect section in the sequencer, click at the value in dsp device that would make the track focus on that device and you could change parameters within the sequencer with it. every dsp device could have a list of controls where you would add those parameters you want to edit, and by clicking on them, you could work on automation too for example. the automation and envelopes i would prefer to see in the central (big) screen too, and for picking the parameters you could also use the mixer localised in the lower end of renoise
True. in this case I would rather see a finished product then a teaser with the next update
I wonder why such harsh statements like “retarded”, “complete useless”, “just a teaser” are needed to bring attention to ideas on how to make the instruments in Renoise more powerful for you. Well, at least those statements have done their job and made this topic a hot topic.
It also seems we did not manage to explain why we had to split down the instrument improvements into multiple parts, multiple releases. Renoise in its current state is overloaded with stuff already. We left the state of adding new features on top of others a long time ago. We now do have to rework, change existing stuff in order to avoid the usual featureitis. This “reworking” is a lot lot harder than simply stacking new features on top of the old ones. First, because you also want to play back your old songs in newer versions (the old way of playing/doing things must somehow remain, which limits the possible changes a lot) and because we need to change the main interface to make room for something new as well; start a new workflow. This of course also is very a hard thing to do, because everyone has internalized the old GUIs and workflows already (muscle memory).
The pre-2.7 instruments in Renoise were basically the ones from Fasttracker. We never really dared to touch them, because of the reasons explained above, and because we prioritized other stuff higher. Completely reworking this old retarded mess (let me use the word “retarded” here), adding something like a fullblown NI Kontakt into Renoise can’t be done in a 0.1 release. Really guys. We can do a lot, but this is far from being realistic. It will take a few more 0.1 release to at least add the most “obvious” features. That’s where we are now.
Further, instruments are not everyone’s most favorite feature in Renoise (see Suvas post for example). Everyone works different, has a different workflows, needs and backgrounds. So it would simply not be fair to spend a year (or more) on a huge release which only reworks the instruments. We also kinda promised to try to release more often (prefer 0.1 releases against 0.5 or even 1.0 steps). Well, dilemma it seems.
So yes, the new instruments are not yet “done”, but we we have at least tried to lay the groundwork for upcoming changes with 2.7, without stealing too much time from other important features. We also can’t make everyone happy with all details of a new features, but at least can try to make most people happy. The bottleneck is also not that we are running out of ideas now, don’t know what could be improved more, but that we have a hard time realizing it (technically and the UI design - and also regarding backwards compatibility).
To make the best from all this, we do need all your help to do this, need to do this all together. Well, that’s what this “Ideas & Suggestions” forum is for, bit I’d wish this could be done with a bit less drama and harsh words sometimes.
We will rework more existing features in Renoise in future, so this thread maybe is a good start to see what we will be dealing with. And how to deal with such “problems” in general. Especially how we can explain better why we do what we do. And to be able to fix problems (also in feature designs) before its too late.
I’m sorry for the harsh words mate, but at the same time, we’re not girls, and it was explained before how such words came along… It’s correct that little bit of drama takes more attention, but if you look at the thread, I don’t think it’s a stupid flame but quite constructive discussion so far. We are aware of the work you do and we appreciate it, perhaps you’ll find some usefull ideas in here too.
If you don’t mind the question though, how exactly it helped to remove the instrument/envelope section ? couldn’t it work as it was before at least until the instruments are developed further ? and would it not be possible to use the original design as a ground zero to work with and improve ?
the meta-slices are quite useless, especially when they’re not even accurate. it’d be nice to have it so that chopping a meta-sample would make it into a new instrument…
but vV’s slices to new instruments is of at least some sort of help.
Renoise sucks!