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.