► Renoise 3 Beta testing starts - announcing Redux

[XG2003]

@Carbonthief

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?

You haven’t used Buzz, obviously…

Watch this, and read this thread:

Brainstorming: Arranger

Here are some of my ideas. Terminology in bold. Basics First of all, the main parts of the arranger will be a time ruler and multiple trackstrips. It’s enough to describe what a trackstrip should contain. A trackstrip will have two parts, the trackheader and the trackcontents. This is much like in the patterneditor, and as in other sequencers with similar arrangers. The trackheader will show trackname and other relevant information. Trackcontents will show clips with trackdata. Up to thi…

I have explained in HUGE detail what is wrong with the Pattern Matrix. If you haven’t used Buzz’s Sequence Editor, you don’t know what you’re missing, and have grown accustomed to doing things the difficult way, yet you think it’s perfect!

[XG2003]

@22tape

“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’.

So you’re saying nobody who’s paid for Renoise should have a say in how it improves in the future? You’re actually saying that “you’re just along for the ride”? LOL. So the devs should just blindly do whatever they think is right, and then wonder why so many users don’t like what they’ve spent years working on? Are you presuming that I don’t like ANYTHING about Renoise, and only want the Buzz Sequence Editor implemented? LOL

@22tape

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.

Yes, of course, I’m always “chasing updates” and not writing songs… LOL
I don’t know why you can’t understand basic English. The ONLY problem I have with Renoise is the Pattern Matrix. I’ve come from a superior sequence editor, in Buzz, and the Pattern Matrix is unfortunately much more time consuming and fiddly to use than the Buzz Sequence Editor. That is a fact, I’ve demonstrated it clearly with videos, very long posts with screenshots, I don’t know what else I can do.

@22tape

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.

I haven’t seen any posts about “missing features”… LOL

@22tape

“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.

This is nothing like that. This is about a TOOL that people USE, not about music, which they listen to… You have a weird and confused view of reality…

@22tape

“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.

More strawmen arguments. Renoise is commercial precisely because it means the devs can AFFORD to spend more time on it. If it weren’t commercial, it would be stuck at version 1 probably, and I wouldn’t blame them.
You’re actually suggesting that adding features that MOST users want is a bad thing! You’re literally crazy. Go away and stop ruining things for the majority - who strangely enough, actually want the things they want, implemented in Renoise…

@22tape

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.

Again, this is totally irrelevant. SOME VSTs cost four times the amount of Renoise, plenty don’t, I just got Dimension Pro and Rapture for about £15 each from Cakewalk. Stop using strawmen arguments.

Your argument is that because YOU don’t care what the devs produce, nobody else should, and paying customers shouldn’t be consulted and listened to. Brilliant.

@22tape

“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.”

And? I can’t use Renoise to write songs very easily because of the Pattern Matrix, so I used Buzz. Which part of “I want to use Renoise with a Buzz Sequence Editor” can’t you understand? This is laughable…

@22tape

“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.

You must be really terrified of change, mustn’t you…

What would be wrong with implementing the Buzz Sequence Editor in Renoise, instead of the Pattern Matrix? Do you even know WHY you’re trying to defend it? LOL. On many, many occasions I have asked Renoise users to make videos showing how they use the Pattern Matrix, and showing how they would do stuff I can do in two seconds in Buzz, in the Pattern Matrix. NOBODY has risen to the challenge. So you ALL know that the Pattern Matrix is inefficient and unnecessarily difficult and time consuming to use, yet some of you will defend it to the hilt!

@22tape

“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.

Absolute rubbish. But nice try. Please elaborate. So if most users want proper MIDI routing, it would be “watered down”? Why? This is pure conjecture, and that’s all you’ve got…

@22tape

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.

How much does Reaper cost for non-commercial use? (That would be MOST users of Renoise, no doubt.)
Who is expecting “all of these things to come at once”? We are complaining because the devs went ahead and did what THEY wanted, and didn’t implement what WE wanted. No piano roll DAW offers the Buzz Sequence Editor, so what are you talking about?

[XG2003]

I felt I had to respond directly to some of the things Taktik said, because they go against everything I thought any group of devs would think about music software they are creating:

@taktik

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?

Umm… yes. Obviously. What else would it be? What most people DON’T want?

@taktik

“Insert some feature here” won’t make anyone a better musician.

I totally disagree. If software prevents you from doing something easily, it takes you more time, at which point you may have lost the idea you were trying to record, edit, etc. Taking you more time means you may just not bother doing whatever it is that the software makes more difficult for you, and write your music differently. Say you want to record audio and it’s difficult in Renoise, you might not be able to write the song you wanted to, because it takes you so much longer, and frustrates you so much, that you can’t do it. We only have limited time. Software should be designed to make things as easy and quick as possible, all the time.

@taktik

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.

Again, I totally disagree, and I’m sure most users of DAWs will disagree. The DAW is a tool, and if the tool is designed in a way that makes life difficult for you, you have to work harder and longer, unnecessarily. That’s the MOST irritating part, when users can easily see that they are performing unnecessary actions to do things that should be easy (like having to click through certain screens to access some function or other, etc.)

@taktik

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.

There is no workaround for the Pattern Matrix problem. Adding stuff that I never use doesn’t inspire me either.

@taktik

Offering new workflows, new ways of organizing things and “seeing” them differently IMHO is a very important aspect here.

I agree, but how can you know if you’re giving your users the workflow and interface they want, if you never showed them what you were working on, until it was finished? All that hard work and you don’t even know if it’s what people actually want.

It’s the same with user interface design: Microsoft have lost billions of dollars because their interface designers came up with ‘The Ribbon’ the ‘Metro’, which most users can’t stand. They allegedly did ‘testing’ but obviously the people responsible for interface design at Microsoft have to CHANGE things in order to justify their jobs, so nobody can trust their ‘testing’ results’. And what was the result? Most people hate Windows 8 because the fools removed the Start button and forced them to use Metro, etc.

@taktik

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.

Again, this is totally wrong and really concerns me. When people are writing music on their computers, they see other DAWs and test them out. They know that DAW ‘x’ can do so and so, but the DAW they are using can’t. They KNOW that their life would be made easier if they had ‘so and so’ functionality in the DAW they are using. It’s nothing to do with being stuck in what they are doing, it’s about feeling restricted and hampered when your DAW makes you do things you know aren’t necessary, or plain can’t do what you want at all (like recording audio, MIDI routing for arpeggiators, etc.etc.)
The issue is that the USERS, and the users alone, can SEE and experience every day what is holding them back in their DAW. I tried FL Studio and while I liked much of it, I can’t paste clips in with a mouse, it’s laborious and time consuming, and ridiculously slow.

@taktik

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?

Yes - since you devs only have a finite amount of time, and spent it on Redux, rather than adding features to Renoise which would bring in more sales.

@taktik

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.

You can keep Renoise alive by offering the features that users and future users actually want, above all others. It’s that simple.

@taktik

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.

That is all that I want - let us see what you are planning, don’t go ahead with major stuff that takes you months or years to do, without showing us and listening to our input.
Renoise 3 is no worse or better than 2.8 for me, for those who like the new changes, great, I hope they produce great things with them. For now I’m back to Buzz because I can’t write songs the way I want to, with the Pattern Matrix.

[taktik]

@XG2003

You can keep Renoise alive by offering the features that users and future users actually want, above all others. It’s that simple.

Even if we would have included the top 10 most features discussed here, this would not have added a Buzz sequencer to Renoise.

You’re not talking about what the community wants. You are talking about what you want. This is just fine, really, but please don’t claim that you want what all others want and we don’t do what others want. This is not fair.

You’re also keeping this whole forum busy for a a few days now with your point of view. We got your point. Repeating it over and over and over again does not make it more valid. I’m sorry, but we can’t do something for you right now. We won’t add a buzz sequencer into Renoise during the beta phase, so this whole discussion does not really help anyone right now.

I’ll move all further discussions from you into “your” Buzz thread from now on.

[lw_pss]

@XG2003

For now I’m back to Buzz because I can’t write songs the way I want to, with the Pattern Matrix.

Finally. Writing music in DAW you’re comfortable with is so much smarter than bothering poor Renoise devs. Glad you made this decision.

[xerxes]

Whats all this talk about Buzz? Can we stop talking about Buzz and more about Renoise? Also, for the love of God - can someone on the DEV team do a video on the new features and how they make sense?

[novemberist]

I’m not a renoise veteran like most of you, but as more or less a newcomer to renoise (and in the field of trackers in general) I have to say, I really really like renoise 3 and find it very appealing to people like me without a lot of experience with audio software (much more so than a lot of other DAWs I have tried so far). I have casually used the Renoise 2.8 trial version in the past and bought my first licence 2 weeks ago. I find renoise 3 very inspiring and appreciate the new features (especially the native convolver, since there’s not that many of them on linux). Please keep up the good work, whatever direction renoise developement may take in the future.

Just one question, taktik. Could you give a quick comment on the state of lv2 support for linuxers?
Is it on the agenda at all and can can we expect that to happen at all in the (not so far) future, or have you decided it’s just too much work and not worth the effort to implement it right now?

[gentleclockdivider]

@ xg 2003 …dude just spend a few days with only the matrix sequencer …
The matrix is fast , fluent , etc…I♥ it

It does everything you want it to do , in a different way …more then enough …If you can’t get over the fact that renoise is not buzz …you have to make a decicion which program you want to use …sure …

Taktik and team …thanks for putting effort in making renoise a better program ,
But the modulation system needs some rethinking !

[gentleclockdivider]

@xerxes

Whats all this talk about Buzz? Can we stop talking about Buzz and more about Renoise?

WHO ?

[22tape]

@xg2003

i’ll just concede right now that you’re right in every aspect. also, i tend to not respond to someone who uses “lol” a million times in one response. there i go exaggerating again…

[Sense_Net]

Whoever is mucking up the Buzz forums with complaints and really specific demands in a rude manner, who is obviously the same person also posting in this thread with specific demands in a rude manner: Shut up!

Edit: Sorry, where are my manners? Shut up, please.

[lw_pss]

@Sense/Net

Whoever is mucking up the Buzz forums with complaints and really specific demands in a rude manner, who is obviously the same person also posting in this thread with specific demands in a rude manner: Shut up!

Edit: Sorry, where are my manners? Shut up, please.

coughmosiscough

[xerxes]

I just took a quick look at the new sampler, and I am really excited! Worth a 3.0 upgrade in itself for sure! Well done devs /> An extensive video tutorial on the new stuff would still be amazing! I see KURTZ did a few in french - any chance you could do those in English?

[N_N]

I just looked into bugs report and so many fixed! Guys you rule I expect new beta soon… Thanks for your hard work!

[ghostdweller]

haven’t used my account like forever

just had log in and tell i like the improvement
takes a bit of getting used to, i had to get a second monitor to benefit to the full amount
but i like it

i think loads of people do. it’s just that they don’t mention it on the forum
Just my 2 cents

thanks and keep up the good work

[KanetonKiller]

Love it too even if i found some gui choice not very useful now (specially the new VSTi panel), the new improvements are greats !

I don’t understand some peoples here bitching about bad modulation system, before 3.0, we can’t have a simple enveloppe per sample in instrument, it’s already a big step foward.

The main focus of Renoise is the sequencer, that’s the most important & as it is now with pattern matrix, channel grouping, routing possibility, it’s near perfect for me…
Renoise is unique in music software & i don’t want a copy of the features we can found elsewere but a useful software that keep the tracker spirit first.

Don’t get me wrong, i’m a hardcore fan of Reaktor, but i use Renoise for composing, not creating super complex instruments and although i’d like to see more modulation possibility in Renoise, i think it need a lot of time to not break the actual workflow.

Hope some of you could understand my bad english

Thanks to the dev for this new version

[fladd]

@KanetonKiller

I don’t understand some peoples here bitching about bad modulation system, before 3.0, we can’t have a simple enveloppe per sample in instrument, it’s already a big step foward.

I think the main problem people (who understand the underlying details) have is that it will be the only step, if the current architecture is kept.

@KanetonKiller

The main focus of Renoise is the sequencer, that’s the most important & as it is now with pattern matrix, channel grouping, routing possibility, it’s near perfect for me…

Actually, the main focus of Renoise (according to the developers) is the sampler.

[xerxes]

I have only one complaint - and it seems nobody wants to answer this. Devs: How come you dont do proper how-to videos of the new features? This would be great for the existing users who do not have hours and hours of time to fiddle around without actually composing music - and it would be a great introduction to new people interested in what the hell this is all about.

I seriously do not understand how you can spend two years on an update (an excellent update might I add) - and then DO NOT spend an hour making a video about it. It is just beyond my comprehension. You should actually make LOTS of how-to videos and put them on Youtube, because there are not many good ones out there. I think with some proper guidance, people would understand trackers better and understand how they can be useful in a combination with another DAW.

Do take this as criticism

Best,
Klaus

[f_d_k]

I think the main problem is the long time in between releases without any roadmap. People wait for say 18 months, hoping for their personal most wanted feature to get added. Obviously most people’s dreams cannot come true - which means for them, they probably will have to wait and hope yet another 18 months. Again without any roadmap. Doing this for a couple of times/years is a surefire way to drive some people nuts.

my 2c

PS. Even though I pretty much gave up hoping for one of my most wanted features, I can live with(out) it and R3 got other awesome new features anyways. But I definitely hope for a slight change in information policy.

[patmaddox (pat)]

I’m sure they will make a video at some point. But it’s still beta, and it’s only available via backstage. So for now just enjoy the early access, figure out what you can, share tips with people…and when 3.0 is ready to drop I bet it comes with updated documentation and video information.

@f+d+k

I think the main problem is the long time in between releases without any roadmap. People wait for say 18 months, hoping for their personal most wanted feature to get added. Obviously most people’s dreams cannot come true - which means for them, they probably will have to wait and hope yet another 18 months. Again without any roadmap. Doing this for a couple of times/years is a surefire way to drive some people nuts.

my 2c

PS. Even though I pretty much gave up hoping for one of my most wanted features, I can live with(out) it and R3 got other awesome new features anyways. But I definitely hope for a slight change in information policy.

What are people waiting for? Renoise says exactly what it does on the home page and has a very generous demo. Yeah I get hoping for something to be implemented, but if it doesn’t happen, nobody’s worse off. Hopefully those people aren’t actually waiting during those 18 months, and are instead making lots of music with Renoise and figuring out ways to take advantage of new features as they come out.