Let me first say a big big thanks to all who were involved into this release, namely the alpha testing group and all who took the time to report problems in the 1.8 bug reporting forum, or gave us ideas on how to make the current set of feature even better and fun to use.
I hope that you noticed that we do not label our suggestion boxes with “trash” and try to listen to every single recommendation; Even if we can not implement your ideas in all cases at once: You all helped to make Renoise what it is. Feature and stability wise.
About the “1.8” forums:
The 1.8 Bug reporting forum will not be deleted, but closed and moved to the archive. We will (tomorrow) merge the rest of the 1.8 discussions forum with the rest of the global forum (to “Ideas and Suggestions” or the “General” board).
Maintaining this release:
If there are any problems left, report them into the “normal” bug reporting forum from now on please. We will (as we did before) maintain this release as necessary and release new updates as soon as there is something to take care of.
1.8. What now?
Well, first give us a small break. Then: Renoise 1.5 and 1.8 were both huge (really huge) “under the hood” releases, where a lot has been prepared to make Renoise ready for the future and prepare some of the open big features (which can be seen with the undo/redo stuff and XML document changes on the surface for example). This is one of the main reasons why maintaining (fixing) and fine-tuning this release took so long. As this preparing step is finished now, the next releases should be more frequent and more feature related. We can not yet promise when which feature will come, but we will try to get Renoise tested and build up more frequently from now on. - Just for the case that you fear to wait another year for a major release.
Thats it. Go download it and do some music instead of browsing forums!
I want to thank all Renoise developers and to those who contributed to this release. This is just a great piece of software in the right way.
I would like to take this opportunity to explain how I selected Renoise for my music work, especially for those who are currently evaluating it or undecided about registering:
I had been using/evaluating Renoise for the last two years. “Evaluating for two years?”, one may ask. I have not used it throughout that period, of course. But coming from a C64 / tracker background, I was really not happy with any of the recent trackers out there. And stuff like Reason, Cubase etc. was just not for me. People were always asking me; “why don’t you do any music on modern platforms?”. Because I was really not comfortable with the software choices available. I was trying to compose but it was just not happening. You know, once you are used to the “tracker” style, it is hard to switch.
When I stumbled across Renoise (I cannot really remember the exact time, but somewhere around early 2005 I guess), I started giving it a try. And by the time, I figured out that this piece of art was going in the right direction. It seemed stable, feature rich, very modern and the most important; well-established. “Well-established” in the sense that you could actually expect some updates to it in the future. Just think of all the tracker projects stopped, right up from FT and ST to 2000s incliners. I think this is the single most important aspect of Renoise to go with it: the Renoise team and the community around it.
Finally, I have registered it last summer and since then I am very well pleased with it. Releases kept coming it during the beta phase, then the betas went public and here is the final release. Throughout this time, it was like an open project and the Renoise community had the chance to contribute to the process. I am a bit regretful that I have not been able to contribute to that process personally, but I can say that I have used all the beta releases and I was very happy with those releases as well. I hope to contribute with some XRNS tools that I plan to develop and I will try to take active participation in beta testing next time.
So, that is it. A bit lengthy post maybe, but I wanted to break my silence in the forum with this one. I urge you all those hiding out to do the same and contribute to the greatest tracker project ever. It is very well worth it.
1.8 is yet another major leap forward, I am so really glad about this. 1.5 was near perfect, 1.8 is even better, thank you for all the work you put in this.