Pressure is still pressure, even when it’s called “donation”. The negative thing here is that if we try to stimulate or shape something to happen out of external pressure or from what we subjectively believe are positive reinforcements, the result might be completely counter-productive.
My suggestion would instead be that such reinforcers are directed towards potential new users of Renoise. So, in essence, I would advocate this kind of “mass action” among Renoise users:
Buy 10 Renoise licenses and distribute them among interested/serious music producers.
Record good videos of various aspects of Renoise production and put them into perspective and in contrast to other music production tools.
Produce high quality stuff with Renoise, make Youtube vids of it, drop positive comments about using Renoise as your primary DAW.
If 1000 Renoise users followed just these three steps as a directed purposeful one-shot, it would have a much bigger impact on the future of Renoise than some $20 lunch money donations for the devs.
I agree with this, though buying 10 licenses is asking a bit much… I posted a glowing review on KVR a while back, and a few days later someone else did the same. I thought ‘aha, I got the ball rolling there!’ But there weren’t any more. I think maybe Renoise users like to work in obscurity and keep it for themselves, which is understandable, but not really a very good idea. I like the idea of a spontaneous outpouring of publicity from the user base. That would be really great.
I’ve got a video of one of my tracks playing in Renoise. I show it to folks who ask how I make stuff when I don’t have one of my computers around. I actually just got done showing someone how I make a song in Renoise, which I tend to do.
Quite a lot of us are casual users of Renoise and giving a review from that perspective may come across as very negative, Renoise does very little that can’t be done elsewhere better (From my point of view that is) unfortunately for me the last thing i used Renoise for (Live noodling using a launchpad) is now done much faster/easier/better in FLS, so now i just keep Renoise around to do a little tracking when i feel nostalgic, if it where a VST i could run inside Reaper i may have used it a lot more, but Rewire is annoying most of the time and Reaper has way more features i need for recording.
So much like i would not review FLS because for most things it is a complete PITA to use (Performance mode is out of this world though) I wouldn’t review Renoise because although i am nostalgic about tracking, I wouldn’t use it for anything important (reliability aside, I can’t think of one crash in all my years with Renoise)
@Bungle: Fair enough. Using several softwares to produce is an unbeatable combination (that is, if you can afford all those licenses).
Also, that would avoid shoehorning features into Renoise, stuff that you might miss from some other software.
What I personally like the best about Renoise is that you really feel “ownership” of your sound. Everything seems like it has been crafted, sculpted from samples. It has pushed my production skills like no other software I can think of.
What matters is bound to personal desires and demands. Whatever any specific program offers the best solution will be the main choice of use and there is nothing wrong with that attitude.
Renoise is not there to be an allround or total solution, it can be used as a total solution if the composer’s demands do not cross the capabilities of Renoise, but in here there are many users that each have different wishes on various areas ranging from offline rendering to real-time performance. For some, specific features inside Renoise allow fast paced creation of rythms and melodic schemes and combine that with other hosts using ReWire. Not everybody prefers that method or not every Host supporting ReWire is offering both Master and slave option (that would either require one of both to make the desired method work)
The area of real-time performance is still in early stages of progress when we look at the current state of Renoise.
On midi and audio routing, there is also lots of room for improvement for Renoise. In that regard i see enough decades of existence for Renoise.
My personal advise always remains the same:Lurk around till Beta time comes and see if anything new turns interesting.
The obvious change in Renoise[sup]3[/sup], if movie trends tell me anything: Renoise 3D. Buy a 3d graphics card, don your 3d glasses, and watch your pattern data fly into your face!
Just my thoughts about the issue. I’m a happy Renoise registered user since 2.8 after long period of not making music. Currently it is a bit different for me as I don’t use Renoise as a complete DAW solution like I used to do back in the days of ProTracker. However Renoise for me is an indispensable tool to layering drums to sample into hardware samplers, fine tuning and finally recording beats into MPC, same with other sequencers. To me Renoise is a very specific but very good tool for what I do.
Btw. Autechre mentioned Renoise in one of Q&A in watmm. I guess the hard part is that those who KNOW really value Renoise but on the other hand they don’t want to give away all they secrets. So how can the developer survive?-)
I’m completely happy with the great non bloated version of Renoise of today, but don’t mind if you make it better. My only sincere wish: don’t ever do the Winamps!
^I think more than not wanting to give away the secrets of Renoise, users don’t want to deal with recommending it to people who can’t get past the false complexity of the pattern editor. Any time I show a screenshot or something to someone of Renoise, people who do produce music in Ableton or whatever, they always say the same thing: “that looks complicated” “that looks like programming i’m not a computer programmer” or some other variation.
Of course it’s not more complicated than a piano roll at all (minus pattern commands which you don’t HAVE to use and can’t use with VST’s anyways). It just looks different. It’s just a different way to display the same information, and IMO it’s a way more efficient and easy to understand way to display the information. I don’t have to keep looking to the left to see what a note is, I don’t have to open and close multiple piano rolls to see if notes in different tracks line up, I don’t have to do anything special to see what midi commands are being used and where, all the info is just there in all its glory. Renoise doesn’t try to hide anything from you, and that scares people for whatever reason.
But the only way for someone to KNOW it’s not more complicated is for them to actually put forth the effort to learn how to use a tracker. I didn’t know what the hell I was looking at the first time I tried to use a tracker, and it looked complicated to me too. But I really wanted to make chiptunes so I put in the effort and discovered I liked tracker pattern editors way more than piano rolls, and thus ended up getting Renoise. Most people though won’t really have a reason like that to push them into learning it.
Much how I see it indeed, it’s a little more technical exactly because it shows how other “MIDI workstations” or whatever would work on the inside while showing a bright and pretty picture to the usah.
Agreed for the most part. But I have to admit that when it comes to layering harmony a piano roll is just much easier. Sometimes when I’m working with chords and I just see a bunch of numbers and letters I really can’t get a good visual understanding of what the harmony is. However if I have a piano roll I can see immediately that I have say, an A7b9. I can do this in Renoise but I have to look at it for a second to see what I’m looking at. In a piano roll it’s instant. I know exactly what the harmony is just by a glance. I can see the triad and any chord extensions that I need to know of. Granted, I know the harmony that I’m trying to work with ahead of time, but if something isn’t working, it’s much easier to look at the piano roll and see if say, I got a b9 and it’s clashing with a chord tone in the melodic line or bass.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all about the tracker. Changed my entire work flow. I can never go back. But just trying to be honest about the advantages of a piano roll (because there are some). There’s still a need for it and it’s understandable why a lot of people want one included in Renoise.
