ask taktik, he should know if martin gore or andy fletcher registered renoise 
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“The developers ignore what we have written there, and just go ahead with new stuff - WITHOUT TELLING US”
well, this isn’t an middle-school group project. the devs aren’t obligated to get our permission for anything. this is their project, and we’ve only purchased a license to use it. and i thank them for that.
i’ve never understood the need for piano rolls or audio tracks, etc. in renoise. it’s a tracker. if you want DAW-type tools, it seems to make more sense to buy a DAW. it’s like complaining that FL or Live doesn’t come with a “tracker instrument” as standard. but they don’t, because they’re not a tracker.
redux is a brilliant idea. it takes their best tool (and the most quintessential tool of a tracker) the sampler-- and makes it accessible to everyone for different production environments. renoise has done with redux what i always thought FL should do with their piano-roll (with all of the quantize, chop, chord, arp options that come with it) which is to wrap it, rename it, and release it as a vst. but they probably never will, because it will undercut FL Studio sales. so huge props to renoise for not giving a fuck about that. and hopefully redux sales will get them some extra money.
also, i’m not against the devs including piano rolls or audio tracks, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the tracker workflow. but i think they should first focus on continuing to make it the best tracker/sampler it can be (like they have in R3). personally i’m really missing threshold recording for the line-in of the sampler (not that this is a common trait of a tracker but it really solidifies the sampler’s workflow with hardware) i’d also love an android version of renoise. i don’t want to get into a “tracker on a tablet” debate, but one of the cool things about the legacy of tracker software has been their cross-platform accessibility/compatibility. and lets face it, outside of word-processing, the qwerty/mouse combo are becoming dinosaurs. sunvox is really impressive, gents.
redux in bidule or audiomulch is going to be fantastic.
yes, i’m old.
Something weird happened to this forum lately. Probably helps if I try to explain a bit more in detail why we’ve done what we’ve done for r3. Not only as a direct response to you, but more in general to what happens in this forum lately.
This release does indeed not concentrate on the top 10 most wanted features discussed in this forum, but concentrates on the heart of the thing which we all obviously care about: a tracker. That is an extraordinary way of working with samples and the numerical, keyboard based musical notation: patterns.
We devs (“them” - as you say) of course knew that this set of features will not make everyone happy, but we also did not expected /so/ many very loud and fretful voices. I really wonder where this comes from and what to learn from this. We had other releases like for example the Lua scripting release which also was not everybody’s cup of tea, but in overall still resulted into positive responses or none at all. This is especially unexpected to me because this release does concentrate on very tracker’ish things, and not on polarizing features like a piano roll or something which is completely off topic.
It’s also not that we’re asking for a lot in return for r3. Many (probably even most) registered users do get this update for free - for nothing. But probably it’s just the combination of changes to an old workflow, the new UI, and the relatively long time since the last release which causes so much division here. This change in the overall mood here actually already started in the Renoise 3 speculation thread.
First, everyone here can (well, must) have a strong opinion on what feature is “needed” most. Of course. But we, here, have to make a lot of compromises.
Like what to do first, what later? What can be realized in a given amount of time at all? What brings Renoise into the “right” direction - what can be continued later on? What will pay our bills? And who should decide that?
If we’d simply stack the most wanted features into a release, can you imagine how this would look like? There must be something which gives the whole thing a shape and rough direction. Lots of compromises have to be made and even if we want, we can’t realize everything we’d like to have in one release. This is especially true when dealing with old and bloated software like Renoise. This will sooner or later break the whole thing and only a few people can then actually follow the changes. And even if we wanted to, we could not fulfill everyone’s wish in one release.
Then, what is a “needed” feature at all? What is an important feature in music software? What most people want?
“Insert some feature here” won’t make anyone a better musician. In 99.8% of all cases Renoise is not a tool to get a job done, but a tool to help you to inspire you. It’s about creativity. An art craft. So whatever we’re adding to Renoise, this can only help you to get inspired. And for everything else there are other tools or workarounds, if you really really can not do what you want to archive in Renoise. Offering new workflows, new ways of organizing things and “seeing” them differently IMHO is a very important aspect here.
Why are so many people waiting for new features for their tool? I think the main reason here is that they got stuck in what they are doing, and hope that feature XYZ finally solves that. It won’t.
And finally there’s Redux now too, which influenced Renoise 3’s features and the decisions on what to concentrate on in r3 and what not. The main Redux idea (it actually had a different name back then) was to get the Renoise way of working with samples and patterns into new areas. Allowing people to use trackers where they make sense most. Allowing to combine a tracker with other musical instruments more easily. It’s true that this clearly does not target most existing Renoise users here and will disappoint many, but it also brings a program that you all like into new areas. Is this really a bad thing?
Another reason why we wanted to concentrate on Redux, was also to expand into a new market. We’re a small team. A very small one actually. Renoise is an extreme niche product while also being a hell to manage. We love what we do, working on Renoise, but we also can’t do this job for nothing. So the idea of a new product, Redux, also, even though not primarily, was favored as well in order to keep Renoise alive in the long term.
So we basically wanted to get back to the root of Renoise with r3 for the reasons noted above, instead of “just” adding new most wanted features on top of the old Renoise. Not only, but also because of Redux - yes. Sharpen and improve it in areas where it’s good and different at compared to other music soft out there and combine this with new and hopefully inspiring workflows.
A lot of those areas (like the sampler) got untended for a long long time. Far too long. And if you look at Renoise 2.8 from the distance, the sampler, instruments are scattered over the whole UI. Making it hard or even impossible to see and understand what exactly the sampler in Renoise is at all. Most of you got used to this in the past years, yes, but try to imagine how Renoise looks to someone who looks at it for the first time.
So we’ve tried to fix this by encapsulating the sampler into a single unit before expanding it. A bit like a VSTi in Renoise, which can be complex as hell in detail but because you are only confronted with those details when actually editing the sound, the thing still stays somewhat manageable. While composing you don’t have to worry about oscillators, what is connected to what and how, to exactly create the sound you’re currently playing. It’s like a box which you can open up if you want to change it, but if you just want to play with it you better leave it closed and only use the one or two buttons that are at the outside of the box.
The same is true for the Doofer and for phrases which do not really add something “fundamentally” new to the Renoise core features, yes, but they allow you to hide, reuse and share stuff. Either with the community or with yourself.
I think this is a big thing in whole workflow in Renoise, and hope that this new way of “encapsulation” and “sharing” gets a bit more clear when we do release the Renoise library file format and structure. Renoise libraries will be small bundled files, which, when installed, inject instruments, phrases, DSP FX and modulation sets into Renoise. So even when most Renoise users do not want to create complex sampler based instruments with macros, modulation, phrases and stuff, someone else can do this for you, and you can use and play all this in Renoise.
And again comes Redux into the play here because it’s a Renoise instrument. So whatever you are doing in Renoise with instruments can be played in Redux too.
So, yes, we don’t have something for everyone in this release, but hope you can at least understand and accept why we do what we do. We are clearly not trying doing this to piss someone off, and do not ignore the “community” in general. Renoise was and will be built on top of and with the community, but on a many-sided one. Most of Renoise’s core team members are very active here. Reality simply is a bit more complex.
But it’s also true that many of those decisions and reasoning is done behind closed curtains, so we clearly should do a better job in communicating them as well.
Its your software, keep doing what your doing, and keep eating too. Just because some weird spoilt fuckers with no friends and no talent keep whinging and wasting useful forum space just to get their, in reality, ugly faces noticed by telling you how to run your company, just means your apart of the same world the rest of us are. People are generally egotistical idiots with no vision.
Me and many others are right now messing around estatically with something you guys/gals created and keep improving.
Pshh, please.
I think a lot of people here that are not too happy with the last release are just very passionate fans of Renoise.
I myself love it to bits as wel but after every major update it’s always a bit depressing to have to look for features you’ve used a thousand times before.
The workflow of MANY people gets scrambled and that’s very frustrating, it takes time to get that back.
I remember when the 2.8 update got release I was sitting on the couch with a date… I got so excited about the release I actually watched the whole introduction movie and tried to explain to my date why this was so incredibly awesome 
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It felt like an awesome workflow improvement and a few requested features were implemented while this release didn’t do much for me personally. (over the years I started working more and more with VSTi’s)
I think the long anticipation for the new BIG release might have killed the joy for a lot of people aswel. So calling everybody that has an opinion other than yours a ‘weird spoilt fucker without friends and talent that keeps whining and wasting useful forum space’ just shows your narrow minded view of the average Renoise user.
great stuff, taktik. i can’t imagine having to be pulled in a million different directions by the user-base, yet having to remain focused on your own vision. props to you guys. especially for focusing on the sampler so munch in R3. i like that direction. looking forward to upgrading when i get the chance.
thanks for your work. and thanks for making it affordable.
I actually agree with all of this. I love the idea of a great sampler with powerful instruments made by the community! I also think this should have priority and that it was a good choice to focus on this for the new release. Still I am a bit disappointed with the beta. Again, not because I would have liked improvement on something else than the sampler, but especially, because I always hoped that the sampler gets more attention and the features it has missed for so long. When I read the beta announcement that the instruments got improved, I got very excited actually. However, I then realized that the sampler mainly got a bunch of new features (which are nice, don’t get me wrong here), while some really basic things got still not addressed (mute/choke groups, sample start/end automation, etc.). I think I (and probably others as well) had wished for a more bottom up approach. To me the sampler still doesn’t feel complete.
If I understood some people like Bit_Arts and gentleclockdriver right, then the new modulation concept is now another part that is not really “complete” and might lead to frustrations of some people in the future.
Please don’t get me wrong here, in general, I am all for making Renoise the best sampler there is! However, this to me means also to make it a workable sampler outside of the tracker workflow (that is, making things work live as well and not only in combination with the sequencer and fx commands) and to implement basic things that other samplers have as well. Renoise will then be unique not because it does things entirely different than other samplers, bu because it offers an alternative approach in addition to what all other samplers can do. I think this will be especially important for the upcoming Redux.
I don’t think they are being “pulled in a million different directions”… Slight exaggeration there. I don’t mind if the devs have their own vision - but it would be helpful if they SHARED it with us all BEFORE beginning coding! It’s literally crazy to just go ahead and implement things which require years of work, without letting everybody know what you are working on. So you’re bound to get loads of people who are unhappy.
I’m not unhappy with any of the changes to Renoise 3, I can use it just as well as 2.8, nothing is worse, it’s just that for me, nothing is better, because all I wanted was the arranger. (I won’t call it ‘Buzz Sequence Editor’ any more, as that term makes people think I want Buzz, when I don’t.)
If you want to increase sales of Renoise, Taktik, maybe you should have implemented the things which were the most wanted - piano roll, audio recording, new arranger, stuff like that. Then you’d see increased sales. You can have a piano roll for those who don’t understand trackers, and still have the tracker. Nobody needs to lose out on anything. More people are using VSTis than ever before, so I don’t see Redux bringing in much money for you, and the time you spent on that (had you asked us), could have been spent on things most people wanted more than Redux. Hell, I presume none of us knew that Redux even existed until the beta of 3 came out, so how many people were asking for something like it on the forums?
I just knocked up a short song in twenty minutes in Buzz. In Renoise it would have definitely taken me twice as long, as I was writing it and jumping from screen to screen in Buzz, I was thinking to myself ‘In Renoise I would be battling with the Pattern Matrix right now, in order to simply put this pattern here, which took me a second in Buzz’.
I don’t have anything against any of the improvements in Renoise 3, some I will use, some I won’t, but it’s the essentials of the interface that you could really help us with - ask us for suggestions, let’s debate everything and see what works and what doesn’t, listening to objections from everybody, and then make it as streamlined and keyboard friendly as possible. Jumping from the keyboard to the mouse, to get to certain parts of the interface, really slows down songwriting.
Is there a way to keep updated on when new betas or the release comes out? Cause I’m getting sick n tired of some forum habits too now. How about a mailinglist?
Lot of your post makes perfect sense but
He never referenced ‘everybody that has an opinion other than mine’. It’s very, very far fetched to take that out of the stuff you quoted.
We all get emotional huh? 
Thanks for sharing your frank thoughts. In spite of my reservations on redux (as you say, it’s probably not aimed at me), let me be clear that I really respect the work of the team and overall I’m inspired by the R3 release.
Like everyone else, I have my own thoughts about the optimal direction but please don’t mistake my two cents for the negativity coming from a vocal few.
Hey, it’s either you love it or hate it at the moment apparently, I’m just going with that
This is precisely what excites me about the future of Renoise 3. The Renoise community has made some absolutely fantastic tools in the past, many specifically for generating xrni’s. They had a ton of restrictions but overcame them in clever ways and created some really awesome stuff. Morphsynth, Padsynth, AwesomeSaws, Resynth, tools like this should become absolutely incredible when re-implemented for Renoise 3. There’s so much that can be done in the sampler now that couldn’t be done before that it’s hard to even compare it to how it was before.
I’ve seen you complain about the pattern matrix several times now, I have to ask: what precisely is “bad” about it to you? It just seems so weird to me, because it was one of the biggest draws to Renoise for me. Of all the trackers I’ve used Renoise has the most intuitive easy to use pattern matrix hands down. If I write a drum loop, in mere seconds I can clone it, and then drag the bottom down as far as I want it to be, and then any changes I make will be applied to all the clones automatically. I can move patterns around easily, I can middle click to mute a pattern without having to mute the whole track (useful for arranging parts, sometimes muting a part makes it sound better and it’s easy to experiment with that in the matrix). All in all the pattern matrix has saved me mountains of time, and I can’t possibly fathom what complaint someone could possibly have about it.
In other trackers block chords would be a huge pain in the ass, but Renoise lets you have multiple note columns in a single track, and it will still represent only one box in the pattern matrix keeping it easy as ever to arrange that part.
Other than it simply being different from buzz, what is it you don’t like about the pattern matrix?
He just hasn’t spend enough time, learned how to compose in Renoise compared to his old workflow. I’ve tried Buzz and prefer Renoise, maybe because I haven’t spend enough time to learn Buzz.
I respect the prioritizing that the devs have made. The tight integration of sequencing and sampler is the Unique Selling Point of a tracker.
Personally I would have preferred if the team didn’t focus on polishing what is already good, but instead fixed and added features that are severely lacking. Then moving on to polishing and improving. I think the problem is that some of us have a vision that Renoise could be a full-fledged DAW, while the devs seem to focus on making it a ‘techno machine’. The tracker stigma still lives, which is a bit sad to me.
Still, I have gotten great value for my money and I’m still eager to see what will happen in future versions!
“I don’t think they are being “pulled in a million different directions”… Slight exaggeration there.”
of course it was an exaggeration. i’m not sure i’ve ever heard any one ever say “a million” and literally mean “one million”.
“I don’t mind if the devs have their own vision - but it would be helpful if they SHARED it with us all BEFORE beginning coding!”
see, i think the exact opposite. this is their project/vision. i’m just along for the ride. i bought renoise because it inspired me with it’s functionality that it had at my time of purchase. i didn’t buy it for ‘what it might be someday’. i think that’s a big downfall for users and devs alike. if you buy something for a feature that it MIGHT have in the future, you’re already doing yourself a disservice. because then it becomes less about making tunes, and more about chasing updates. and that’s no fun for anyone. well, in theory it doesn’t seem like fun, but these gear boards are flooded with fools who do nothing but take joy in crying “missing features”. missing features? RTFM before you buy. if it’s not there when you bought it, it’s not missing.
“It’s literally crazy to just go ahead and implement things which require years of work, without letting everybody know what you are working on. So you’re bound to get loads of people who are unhappy.”
for me, that’s like saying musicians should have to send out their music to their fans before they release it to make sure they like it, before they release it. i’m so glad that doesn’t happen. just make your music. if they like it, great. if they don’t like it, great. simple.
“If you want to increase sales of Renoise, Taktik, maybe you should have implemented the things which were the most wanted - piano roll”
i can’t speak for taktik, but i’d say it’s safe to assume that renoise is not a money making venture. sure, it puts food on the table, but it’s a passion project above all else. people pay 4x the amount for a single virtual instrument than they do for renoise, which is a whole production environment. if the devs were into making boat loads of cash, they wouldn’t be designing a niche product like a tracker to begin with.
“I won’t call it ‘Buzz Sequence Editor’ any more, as that term makes people think I want Buzz…”
“I just knocked up a short song in twenty minutes in Buzz.”
“In Renoise I would be battling with the Pattern Matrix right now, in order to simply put this pattern here, which took me a second in Buzz’.”
just use buzz, homey! it’s a great program.
“I don’t have anything against any of the improvements in Renoise 3, some I will use, some I won’t, but it’s the essentials of the interface that you could really help us with - ask us for suggestions, let’s debate everything and see what works and what doesn’t, listening to objections from everybody, and then make it as streamlined and keyboard friendly as possible. Jumping from the keyboard to the mouse, to get to certain parts of the interface, really slows down songwriting.”
i understand and appreciate this sentiment. unfortunately, democracy rarely works with creative concepts/ideas. the more hands that are in the pot, the longer it will take to cook, and usually the end result will be watered down for the sake of appealing to the masses.
RENOiSE 3 FOREVER!!! 
Seems like many are forgetting this. If I wanted a DAW with tracker- and piano roll interface and modular routing and direct link to NASA I would expect it from a product costing a lot more. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect all of these things to come at once. And even if they never come Renoise is still an awesome piece of software, if I really, really wanted these things so badly I would just use a piano roll DAW.