I bought Renoise few months ago at 3.0 and that’s what I started from. Earlier I tried to make some use of an old PPC Mac and messed with 2.72 ('cause it’s the last ppc built) on it. Here is some thought from the “downgrade” experience. Note that i’m new to Renoise/trackers, or even daw in general, so the suggestion may be biased and un-knowledgeable.
1.One thing I like about the sample editor is “Process with track FX” (the habit probablly comes from resampling on Roland SP-404), in 3.0 if you want to tweak track DSPs you need to go back and forth between mixer/pattern and instrument; while in 2.7 the dsp is always there at the bottom.
Now that 3.0 introduces DSP at instrument level, you might want to change the function to “Process with FX chain”, or even further, expand the function to something wild like “Freeze/Render current Modulation/FX chain” like you would do to a VST plug-in. But what I really need is simply a DSP interface at mouse’s reach when editing samples. This is probablly no biggie if you are detaching the Instrument window, but I’d like to stay with full screen mode. (it really feels good)
2.There is a option to playback at defined pitch in 2.7 that seemes to be ditched in 3.0, usually I just use keyboard to play transposed sound, but the 2.7 in-editor playback has the adventage to play at any specified point AND pitch at ease, that really make finding interesting stuff in long samples easier.
I understand the removal of the option since you are able to achive the same result by transposing a slice point anyway, but that’s pretty awkard in practice.
3.The experience with 2.7 gives me the impression that the development is toward a more complex sampler instrument (aka Redux?). The empowerment seems to get in the way of the overall integrity 2.x had, and kinda split the program into seperation, i.e. a sequencer/mixer host and a sampler instrument. And now with the phrase editor universal to sampler/plugin/midi, it kinda make the whole situation more complex.
What I like to see in the 3.0 direction is not a better integration of pattern editor and instrument like 2.x had, but instead, a better integration of phrase editor and patter editor, like:
- view phrases that executed in pattern editor (something like a “zoom-in” system, or layering)
- use the matrix to manage phrases
- give phrase editor the ability to control instrument dsp (like pattern effects do to track dsp)
For me 3.0 has already lost it’s “innocence of simplicity”, now it has chance to grow into another wild beast.
