They don’t HAVE to affect all member tracks, do they?
Again, they don’t HAVE to share common effect chains, right?
And finally, Favoriting of plug-ins … 
The Group shows as an extra Track in of itself where you can add effects and pattern commands. I haven’t tried it yet but I assume it is talking about those put in these special Group Tracks, not those contained within all the children of the Groups.
Yeah I checked it out, you can have “master” group/pattern fx on top of the track ones. Cool!
I have a problem though, I can’t insert a pattern at the beginning anymore with Ctrl-Insert. This just inserts a pattern at the end.
No matter what other method I use, everything inserts at the end.
[edit]
Ok, insert pattern at beginning works now, but now whenever I delete a pattern, no matter what the current pattern is, it always deletes the first one.
And when I delete a pattern it gets auto-cleared. Pretty dangerous imo.
It’s a really great update but I have one question though.
When using a VST and open the VST interface renoise itself loose the focus.
Which mean that the qwerty-keyboard won’t trigger a sound unless I click on the Renoise-window again.
Is this because I tried the x64 version and the plugin is 32bit (since I see a seperate application in the taskbar) or is this some new behaviour in 2.8?
Is it fixable?
Yes
Most probably not. Not quickly and for this release anyway. There are multiple threads and comments on the subject already.
great release again
always nice to try the new features
small question; “how big of a hassle is it to make more things detachable?”
like mixer for instance, (sample editor,pattern editor, disk browser and/or the sequencer.)
this would boost my renoise workflow like nothing else (dual screen setup)
just a question 
I am terribly sorry for starting the roll of post on this subject. It is quite clear from the update that the main priority for this update have been updating the architecture and improving the workflow in the app. Having a multiple platform 64 bit program up and running that is able to run home made scripts stable is no small feat and this update contains the updates needed for professional work. In the end concepts such as being able to to everything natively in renoise is much more a hobbyist thing, and I’d rather have a professional tool that does what it does properly than a hobbyiest tool that does “what I want” but terribly outdated.
I guess that a drawback at offering the software so cheap is that you get all of us weird hobbyist who want weird features instead of what is really needed.
Good job on the update guys!
Can any provide some objective quantified stats on how many Renoise users are Professional (with a capital p), and how many are hobby users?
The proof!
I would, but the laptop is on the other side of the globe and its video card is fried anyway.
Just tried 2.8 out, and it seem to use more CPU than the earlier version.
Something about that made me curious. My setup is not that up to date, and a few songs I’m working on, is on the limit on what my computer can handle, cpu wise. And when I played one of them in 2.8, I see 99.99% in cpu usage in renoise, and in the Windows task manager, it says somewhere around 50-80% cpu usage. What is that about? 
Bridged plugins use more cpu if you use them in the bit-edition of Renoise that plugins would not run natively in.
Nice new version.
Finally, the thing I have been going on about for YEARS has been implemented; grouping of tracks!
Good stuff.
Liking all the other new features too.
Looking forward to the final version.
Cheers.
We would need a poll for it.
lacks an option for freelancers/semi-pro’s.
Lots of enthusiasts ! (I’m one of them) . It would be interesting to see the evolution of those kind of statistics with time.
Is there any way to open 2.8 songs in 2.7.2?
I’ve tried 2.8 at my workplace, and worked an hour in a song,(just native dsps), and now I can’t open it in 2.7.2…
no, there is no way to do it
Not entirely true, manually patching the song.xml in the xrns archive you can do quite a bit but if you use 2.8 specific features, you do have a problem.
No it actually doesn’t, and my questions was somewhat rhetorical. But the survey shows an interesting result: there is a high percentage of enthusiast users and a small amount of pros. And in a sense all the top three categories are hobby users. So in light of this I’d say Renoise’s marketing and development is well aimed at a certain niche.