Same here, recording your voice or something else with a digitizer was like black magic for me. We may sound like nostalgic people but Im’ not, I just feel that sometimes we acts like spoiled childs.
In 2019 we have everything we need to make any type of music anywhere.
Yes but i’m more impressed by guys like Rob Hubbard or Martin Galway on C64 ( with even much more limitations than on the amiga )
I totally get it, and I really feel your ultimate point is spot on - all of this is about making music. I think your comments at their root digs at a deeper point though, which is really about how much software really helps us vs. hinders us. I am still greatly fond of the memories and power of using an Alesis QS6.1 with an MMT-8 and feeling amazed at the ability to put together a reasonably full song with no software whatsoever. It’s weirdly challenging to still find hardware like that now - decent, functional, reasonably-priced sequencers, non-restricted workstations or synths with multi-timbral support. I actually have an Alesis Andromeda and Squarp Pyramid, both amazing in their own right, which I thought would give me a similar and powerful experience … nope. Just not the same … with options comes complexity and functional challenges in the creative process.
I make electronic music. I grew up in very small rural towns with 3 radio stations: a top 100 station, a county station, and a hard rock station. I didn’t know what electronic music was until 6th grade and the teacher’s son brought music in from a “big city”. InfoSoc, Kraftwerk, and Depeche Mode grabbed me like an alien spaceship beaming up a hillbilly out of the woods … it’s some of the only music that’s ever made sense to me (immensely so at the time). If I could just pick up a guitar to make everything that’s in my head, I’d never experience any of these issues at all … but my creative demon flies very differently.
Much like how VR and AR seek to expose us to new worlds, yet face continual uphill battles with ergonomics and comfortable user experiences (for many reasons), I constantly find the same with so many of the tools we use when writing electronic music. The force of constant OS upgrades and version changes to our software and creation process … the changes to the infrastructure (DAW, protocols, hardware, etc.) … these things regularly force us to adapt new workflows while introducing new problem. I feel like it’s greater when you write electronic music from scratch, constantly seeking new and interesting ways to make sounds and rhythms, especially without a cohesive set of standards for MIDI implementation and plug-in foundation. Things NI’s NKS is one of the most promising solutions I’ve ever seen … yet it does come laced with it’s own issues, like anything else.
The greatest challenge I face regularly writing and mastering electronic music (often done in part on the fly because of the sheer dynamic range of frequencies and FX variation during the creative process) is raw processing power and the performance of the tools I’m using. Changes in tempo, changes in keys, changes in synced delays and LFOs … all of this needs close to or immediate response to maintain the same immersive creative experience that you might find if you were working with that single guitar … and that means performance in your tools, and things that aren’t getting in your way. It means feel comfortable and in control hammering out your current workspace to accomplish what your trying to do, with all your tweakable controls very close and right there.
I often think of Orbital … I’m not sure I’ve ever heard another group (maybe Apparat or wisp, maybe) who can pull of such diverse but incredibly cohesive frequency explorations in the electronic space … but it’s where they live, and they’ve had the money and tools to explore those solutions and make them happen … not without challenges of their own no doubt, but they’ve done it time and again.
It’s a search, it’s a battle. In some ways I’m sure it will never be completely resolved … but when I can write all my stuff without performance issues, it will be an incredibly awesome space. It’s close … my toolset is mostly happiness that allows very flexible creativity searches … but yeah, I’d like this part solved, lol.
Mickey
Ditto. Yeah, Fasttracker II for me a lot in the 90’s.
Different time for sure, and different space, especially working with samples. Some incredibly amazing things … lol … I’m not sure we could have envisioned some of the amazing diversity and creativity of tools today, what could be possible.
But yes … all with a performance cost. I will always hope to see that resolved enough to be invisible during the creative process.
I’ve always installed only VST2 versions of my VSTs. I only use Reason with this wrapper. You could try to use the latest version from Polac (1.1.10b (29-Mar-2019)):
https://www.xlutop.com/buzz/
I only hav one vst3 ONLY which is Sketchcassette which is a pity it doesnt workzz yet in Renoise.
A matter of time untill this will be implmted into Renoise iam sure and have no worriezz.
This is great! Now the only thing I’m missing is VST3 support so I can load the new Reason Rack vsts 
you wont ever see that, believe me!
Why???
because he (taktik) is not able to do that and/or it will take years for him because he´s the only coder for renoise!
same. bought reason 2 years ago or so. rewiring it to renoise is actually a nice thing to do.
i haven’t updated to v11 yet. but will do so, soon. and finish a song in reason which i’ve started in renoise.
this is just because of the pianoroll workflow … is much faster.
i need to mention that the raw song idea and structure has been made in renoise, tho.
same here. started with soundtracker, tried like almost every tracker on amiga. got stuck to pt2.3d, tho.
quadracomposer was a nice thing, back then. chryllian (or so) wrote a whole jazz music disk with it.
speaking about the amazing and famous jungle tunes from back then. if you speak of aphrodite’s songs,
well they got mastered in a studio. so that sound got pimped and isn’t pure amiga magic 
can’t remember any other awesome d&b songs, except those from phase’d and my shit from back then.
please, can you briefly list the advantages of VST3? what makes it so much better that it is a MUST?!
you have to buy a lisence for every vst you are releasing? isnt it 1 lisence for every vst you write?
IMO VST3 brings only visible benefits in combination with note expression, but this won’t come in Renoise. Another reason is that VST2 officially is deprecated and bigger companies tend to only support VST3/AU now. It could be that the VST2.4 wrapper in the VST3 SDK was removed now, too. Also AFAIK Taktik already is working on an implementation. VST3 also provides some CPU cycle-saving features (which Renoise already provided before), which may work more accurate, so switching your project from VST2 to VST3 seems to be a good idea in general.
This is my primary concern. Can’t fuel my GAS without VST3!
I’ve seen so many unresolved technical arguments debating whether there are performance gains / CPU efficiency with VST3, I decided to judge for myself.
I took full/pro or full/pro trial versions of every modern DAW in Windows I could find supporting both VST2 and VST3, as well as several that are VST2 only, and went through dozens of plugins I own or use regularly, using songs I was actively writing, to evaluate across them.
I can’t tell you the technical reasons for what is happening on the back end or between the DAW and plugins, but I could easily see that the performance / CPU efficiency of VST3 in general was just better.
I this is actually highly relevant to a tracker like Renoise when working heavily with plugins (like I do), in part because of the default note/plugin cut-off design. I’ve frequently caught plugin effects processing heavily in patterns on empty tracks with no audio, or generators that continued even after explicit note cut-off in Renoise that I don’t see happen in typical midi-roll implementation in other DAWs. Again, I don’t know all the technical details, but it seems the VST3 api is designed in a way that helps/forces managing inefficiencies like this.
Another benefit directly affecting my creative process is audio-routing / side-chaining support between tools. Being able to use tools like Meldas Morph to blend audio signals requires multiple audio signals routed from two or more other sources. When I’m writing music for a film, I need creative functionality like this. While I have used DDMF’s meta plugin to accomplish this, the performance hit to do so in conjunction with everything else has many times left me in a situation where CPU pegs out and Renoise stops, no matter how efficiently I attempt to use effects and generators, even on relatively high horsepower multi-threaded CPUs … and where implementing the same plugins and song in a DAW with VST3 support doesn’t.
My arguments are not buried in technical speculation or being modern just for the sake of it … I have real-world situations that a lack of VST3 support in a VST-based DAW impact heavily. I love the speed and unhindered workflow of a tracker, I just want (reasonably I feel) my core tools to have the support and attention a commercial product deserves.
Exploring the vast sea of tools nowadays and the reality of what really works in your own workflow is an interesting process … I’ve certainly been through my share of tools.
By now I’ve got a pretty cut and refined set of tools, and rarely buy new ones … but all of these have VST3 now or actually need it to function. The only exception to that is NI, which I want to believe will have VST3 support at some point, hopefully soon … but I’d live without the entire NI Ultimate library in a heartbeat for a VST3 only solution.
i’ve just tried the vst3 wrapper solution. it DOES work, the bad part about it is, once you’ve removed a a .vst3 file from the folder, and put it back again … or rename the VST3 folder, the dll won’t re-recognise the files/folder again.
i haven’t found where the plugin is storing it’s vst3 folder location or saved/cached vst3 plugins, yet.
i’ve tested magicdeatheye and pulsar mu as vst2 and vst3 versions… haven’t noticed any big difference, gui wise.
resising isn’t even possible. but maybe that might be because of the wrapper. i dont know yet.
Wait, there’s Aphrodite tunes that were made with (the help of) an Amiga?!?! I have to know more, please, I beg of you, elaborate 
there you see his amiga setup. as you see, he has an akai hardware right above his amiga.
another original by him.
Ohhhhh!! Thanks for this awesome post. I had faintly heard about Urban Shakedown back then, but I never knew Aphrodite was involved with that. And I had no clue there was so much more!
Hi Everyone.
Thank you, Renoise team for all your work. Renoise is the best music tool in the world.
I know this subject has been brought up before and you are working hard on it. Still, a lot of responses have been that there are not so many VST3’s and VSTs done using VST2 still work just fine. However, now that Steinberg has completely killed and buried the VST2 framework, it is very difficult for people who want to develop new plugins to do VST2. I just wanted to highlight this perspective. For what it’s worth (exactly 1 avid Renoise user’s opinion…) VST3 support is the number one feature request for me : )
Keep up the great work!
Cheers to all
So as we understanded, next update ist the prio of vst3 for renoise 3.3