I just have to comment on this, because there are more issues involved here.
To be more specific, there seems to be a lack of strong demand for ReWire (relative to other demands for Renoise features) within the Renoise community. Of course, that’s an unfortunate fact to accept for all of us who would prefer to utilize the powers of Fruity Loops, Reason, ACID etc and slave those to our favorite tracker (i.e. Renoise acting as ReWire master).
However, and this is important to remember, there aren’t just the Renoise community that makes Renoise users (and customers). There are also potential and future users out there. We don’t know exactly how many. But they are most likely already using other musical software, have collected their favorite VST’s and DX-plugs and are basically just looking for a composing workflow that is fast, easy and fun. Here, the tracker concept shows up as an attractive candidate. Just imagine what happens when such user tries out Renoise and discovers that it’s very complicated and time-consuming to export the notation data to .mid-files, or to make a perfect sync bridge to his other softwares.
Well, such try-and-evaluate user won’t stay a user for long. In fact, as a salesman/marketing pro of musical software, I have witnessed firsthand several serious producers who at first are curious about Renoise, only to conclude that it’s not “professional enough”. Why? Because of the “communication problem”, the “closed doors”, the non-existing bridges to other software, as they see it. “What? No MIDI export…? Not even ReWire? Forget it!” – that’s the common reaction.
Personally, I’m getting quite tired of all this. It’s hard to volonteer as a salesman for Renoise, when the product simply isn’t possible to sell. When Renoise 1.8 came out, I had the opportunity to cover it in Sweden’s largest music magazine, selling it to many readers. But this never happened, because I (and others) found that the tracker concept wasn’t strong enough; what really counts here is the tracker concept as integrated with already established DAW solutions.
And that’s where either midi-export or ReWire enter the picture. Either of them would attract many new users, both of them would make Renoise a professional DAW that, with proper marketing, could steal the customers of big names in the industry. It’s so sad to see that a majority of established Renoise users insist on having the software as a self-contained, isolated island, adding stuff into it that commercial 3rd party solutions handle much better.
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