Hi there, new to renoise. I have an old windows xp computer that I wish to use a tracker program with to communicate midi messages to external hardware devices. from what I can tell there is a few options for software trackers that support windows xp, some being legacy software options that I am curious about potentially learning and using for music making. I am wondering if renoise is a tracker that I should include in my list of tracker software to learn?
is there a version of renoise that was developed with compatibility for windows xp which included midi out so I can control external synths and hardware?
Hello and welcome!
In general, I think people around here will say “yes, you should learn Renoise” because most people on this forum love it. I think the documentation is good and concise and there are some great videos on youtube too to get you started.
Regarding the Win XP topic: I’m more of a Linux/Mac guy, so I don’t know the specifics of Windows versions, but I do know that if you buy Renoise you can access all the the older Renoise builds from backstage.renoise.com — I saw old Windows 32bit builds as old as Renoise 1.2.x or somewhere around there. Hope this helps.
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You can pick up the last Stable Release (Demo version) that supported 32-bit Windows here:
https://files.renoise.com/demo/archive/Renoise_3_1_0_Demo_Win32.exe
The following page lists all Major releases going back to 1.1.1 available to download as Demos:
https://www.renoise.com/archived-releases
Like @lowph stated above, if you purchase a Renoise license you will gain access to the Backstage (User Area) which includes the ability to download fully licensed versions of Renoise (including the previous releases). This goes back as far as Renoise 1.2.8
I am not certain what the minimum OS specs were for the various older releases, but I’d start with the 3.1 release and work back from there if you can’t get it to work.
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Oh, I didn’t realize older builds could be downloaded without a license (demo). That’s cool, so you can test if it works before buying
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yea this is what I was hoping to do. essentially I wanna see what works for me and what is a workflow that is intuitive and gets me the results I hope to get.
another question I have. does the workflow of previous versions differ a lot to the more recent versions of renoise? essentially, if I learn an older version of renoise how much transfers to the modern versions? for example there are loads of tutorials on recent versions of renoise available on yt which is fantastic. it’s a brilliant educational community, if I learn through these modern tutorials would the knowledge and workflow be applicable to earlier versions? or was there a bit change in the system and it’s all completely different now?
I think the general paradigm is the same, although I haven’t gone any further back than 2.8 or 2.6. I don’t think the tracker interface changes all that much, but there might be some slight differences (maybe new commands?). Personally I have used other trackers since the 90s and I can’t even remember what’s different in Renoise — when I’m using the tracker, it just feels like I’m using a tracker!
Sometimes new effect devices are added in later versions: for example, a big one recently was the sidechain device that you won’t see in older versions. There are some slight differences in naming things also, like for example what are now “audio effects” I believe used to be called “DSP effects” (digital signal processing), but they work the same way.
Long story short: if you get the highest version that’s supported on your OS, I think it will be a valuable learning experience that is transferrable to current versions. When new Renoise versions come out, I don’t think “oh no! now I have to learn everything again!” because it just feels like I’m using the same software.
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