When you’re trying to think about the way some “realistic virtual instruments” are done, you understand that they’re build with the help of multiple layered samples, that are post-processed with internal dsp fx chains. Some famous VSTis, not only Kontakt, but also, for example the fabulous “reFX Nexus”, are based on this principle. And you can’t say that Renoise goes in the wrong way with this release, because everything that truely works nowadays, (i.e. that people are ready to buy - or sell ) - are banks of cool realistic, rich, and evolving instruments usefull for making the quality music you want. Allowing Renoise - Redux to go in this ground is logical and I’d say, necessary.
Saying that, the .xrni instruments have always been limited, because if they where multi-layered, they could NOT be “modulated” and they didn’t contained any DSP fx… So that’s what changed yiou realized it. And now we’ve got something in our hands that will in a near future allow us to work with something truely realistic, easy to modulate, and also easy to use for newcomers. Think about newbies. They are in the market like everybody. They want to use cool instruments but they’re not hardcore digital muzakers that will use more that one or two knobs. And in the end they make their decisions because of some little details like simplicity, efficiency. And don’t ask you why they simply ignored for now the renoise instruments. Because of the messy GUI !
For example : in Renoise 2.8.1 the “Instruments settings” horizontal tab, was truely confusing, small, but with side pannels hiding some important informations, with 3 different sections (SAMPLES, PLUGINS, EXT MIDI ), but visually, the sample editor was somewhere else, and the keyzones were somewhere else in another tab. And honnestly the result of this, is sad but true : it wasn’t clear, especially for newbies, that finally ignored the “instrument concept”. They often told me that renoise instruments looked far too complicated for them ; some still don’t understand clearly, the difference between “samples” and “instruments”… Don’t ask yourself why lots of user simply ignored the power of “renoise instruments” last years, this is because the messy tabs on the bottom of the old GUI.
Saying that let’s recognise that Redux has “helped” the devteam to re-organise and clarify the “instrument” concept in Renoise, and it probably helped the devteam to get visually, the best possible editing panels for it. And I guess that creating a new “'sampler” tab on the top of the software GUI, that correctly associates the samples lists, the sample editor, they keyzones, the modulations and the post DSP fx chains in a logical way, will also push some people to go deeper and discover the full power of it.
So, in the end, I see Redux as the last step in a bigger process of
(1) grabbing the best existing plugins - remember the “plugin grabber” ?
(2) tweaking the grabbed plugins and making them fully .xrni compatible
(3) exporting .xrnis to “Redux banks” or Redux based VSTis
(4) selling it at a low price (compared to other solutions)
(5) allowing more people to enjoy quality instruments but with “competitive prices”
Isn’t it a game changer ?
It doesn’t make sense for me to buy redux since I’m already using renoise.
