The Renoise Newbies Feedback Thread

General Discussion
1

As the topic title suggests, lets collect some feedback here about how Renoise looks and feels like from a “newbies” point of view.

Why? Because many of us here (for sure the whole renoise-dev team) are long term Renoise tracking nerds. Often its hard to understand whats hard to understand when seeing and using this program for the first time. Aka, we need your help to make Renoise even better.

What we want to know:
What you love, what you hate, what took a long time to understand what not, whats still a misery for you in Renoise and so on. What should be changed to make existing features more prominent and easier. Which tools in Renoise seem totally useless to you (just bloat the interface), which tools do you miss…
Well, I hope you got the point ;)

Would also be cool to know your background then: Which soft/HW you/'ve use/used before.

Ah, and no praises please, but constructive stories and stuff!

2

I remember when I first tried it I was scared and didn’t understand. Just sat there clicking the keys in the instrument editor screen.
Gave up and eventually got Reason and stuck with it. That was fun but I wasn’t getting anywhere, just making stupid loops. After reading 1.8 was in beta I purchased Renoise on a whim. Having purchased it I was sort of forcing myself to learn it or else i was just wasting money.

What I remember helping me a lot was those tutorial videos by vv and his wacky accent.

3

Hi taktik / everybody,

I haven’t been using Renoise that long, in fact my only experience with tracking software was many many moons ago with Octamed - and I just didn’t get it.

Used FL and ACID (if the two companies were ever to merge the name of the software should be chosen carefully :D ) and some Logic on the course I went on.

I read the feature on trackers in Computer Music and that prompted me to try the Renoise demo. The tracking style then hit me and its this whole approach and feel that I have fallen for.

Anyway, its generally, in no specific order, these things that I ‘love’; being able to apply effects at any point in the timeline with a simple text command (0e00, 0b00, 0900 get a good run for their money, but also being able to trigger VST effects on and off is just pure :yeah: ),slick automation concept, tidy and uncluttered ‘windowless’ user interface, ‘render selection to sample’ (if this could have the option to render selection and assign to new track it would be even better) the more recent (CTRL+ALT+F3) clear muted tracks command really helps with the workflow, generate drum kit and save as instrument.

I really can’t say I hate anything, but it would be useful to me if you had the option of a right click and ‘send sample to next empty sample slot’ when loading samples (may as well ask in case I haven’t found it yet - does this feature already exist?); automatable envelopes and, on a less important scale, a master pitch control slider (sliding up and down changes the pitch of all samples / VSTis by the same amount).

It took a little while to understand the bpm / speed concept. However, nothing is really bothering me now and in comparison to when I first started using the program, I’m flying around it now. The hints box has been very useful!

Things that I miss are: the FL beat slicer (its mainly pitchshifting and having filter, volume and pitch envelope controls on sliced hits that I miss, although I would love for Renoise to have a fully fledged beat slicer). I also miss to a lesser extent the playlist (where patterns are arranged in FL) although I’m undecided in my own mind about this - in some ways the Renoise pattern sequencer forces me to think more carefully about the next pattern - do I want to just slap pattern 0, 1, 2 and 3 here again, in which case I’ll have to do a bit of clicking around, or, should I spend that time developing a new pattern that takes the song in a different direction? At this stage I am not a keen advocate for the new arranger.

Ok, I hope I haven’t bored anyone too much with all that…I’ll hand over to the next guy now.

thanks for reading

x

4

i’ve been using renoise for over a year now, i guess that makes me still a new user ? well maybe not…
before renoise i played a bit with buzz and before that i used reason.

i found out about renoise because dblue was talking about it on the kvr forums, the combination of me looking for new ways to make music (tracking was totally new to me) and finding glitch vst awesome made it so that i just had to try renoise… … … the awesome friendly and helpful community here and on irc also was nice bonus indeed.

Vv’s video tutorials gave me a really good jump start, i think there should be a link to them right under the demo download links. i have to say i was a bit disappointed when finding out the intro video part2 was text based only, it felt a bit unproffesional to switch the format like that… it left me saying "wtf?, noooo :huh:"
the manual is fine, i really liked the animations examples that come with it. i feel there should be a option to search the manual by keywords. and perhaps the different sections could also have links to relevant inDepth articles.

there was only one two things i wish i knew from day one: you can drag patterns to anywhere in the chain !!! omg

and i found out this just two weeks ago : you can actually double click inside a pattern to jump the edit cursor to it.

things i wish for since 1.8:

  • multi pattern playlist
  • quantize of ‘live’ midi input
  • midi channel filters
  • arpeggiator
  • support for mfx
  • set a chordscale (like flstudio)

overall i’m still deeply in love and get funny feelings in my belly everytime i boot her.

5

I found renoise when i was searching for a replacement for Buzz which i used for years.
First time I tried I din’t feel like reading that hugh manual… i just tried to play around with it
First impressions… wtf no modular view, no pattern arranger -> drop it.

After looking at a couple of other trackers, i came back to renoise and this time did read the manual. Finally I tought it’s not that bad.
I still use it, especially since it is available on linux now. I switched from win to linux 6 months agoo.

Feature requests ?

  • (Not for me anymore but would be important for newbies) : a smaller quick start manual to get you going.
  • Pattern arranger (yeah i know…)
  • Possibility to stop renoise from scanning vsti’s at startup. This slows down renoise startup

Best idea since the start of renoise developpement was the port to Linux !

k

6

I use Renoise for over 3 month now. I guess i’m a good noob :)
I haven’t yet discover everything in Renoise so I hope I won’t say too much bullshits.

My background:
I make music on my computer since 1999, I was using a really cheap soft : SoundClub (for those who know it).
Then I used Buzz, Cubase, SoundForge, I made some crappy synth with Reaktor, tried Logic and Protools a little bit…

What rocks :
When a friend told me about Renoise, he spoke a lot about the “render to selection” feature …
That’s the first “rocking” stuff about Renoise.

Another thing that is really cool is the possibility to edit wav, pattern, sequence … everything without opening another application. Also, switching from wav editor to pattern editor (for example) is really easy.

In fact these two features still impress me now .

What sucks:
Placing sounds in patterns with a computer keyboard is not quite easy.
I tried to “convert” a friend to Renoise but he never really did because he didn’t like/understand the way you “put a note”.

Some effects and their utilisation are for me still difficult to understand. The feature is cool but the way you use it is not simple.

What help me:
I’m too lazy to read, but I’ve seen much youtube videos who really help me! (Thx a lot Vvois, Kaneel, Shaypah, Kaosbeats)

What took long to understand:
The way to export a wav from a song ^^’

Well that’s it, I hope this will help you :)

7

I’m far from a tracker or Renoise n00b, but I have yet to completely finish a track in Renoise! Call it writers-block, procrastination and/or pure psychological, but somehow I have trouble arranging my ideas to completion in Renoise (>247 work in progress tracks). I didn’t have that problem when I used madtracker (for the sketching) in conjunction with Cubase 5.1 (for the arranging).

Even though Renoise was shaping up nicely around 1.2 or 1.5 (can’t remember version no# exactly), I didn’t switch from madtracker with its ‘inferior’ features. Madtracker felt more closely linked to my fasttracker upbringing, 4XY patterncommand in Renoise, while I was used to AXY were small turnoffs as well…eventually, by going through the manual, and simply sticking to Renoise I converted, and dropped Madtracker and Cubase altogether :) (still use wavelab for editing & mastering, Renoise sample editor is good but needs additional pimping -> separate channel editing is a must)

I guess what I miss the most right now is a proper arranger for the patterns, but that is being worked on, so cool.
From a Renoise or Trackers n00b points of view, I could imagine having problems with translating bpm/speed & patternlength to musical ideas. For example: how do you translate a intricate breakbeat pattern with samples in a grid of 64 steps? What does 64 steps mean in time, is this a 1 bar loop, 2 bars? etc (after working with Renoise for a few months, years ago, I accidentally stumbled on the fact that you could actually change the default length :) )

That said, the flash tutorial helps with the example of the simple house beat every 4 steps to get a quick feel of tempo in relation with the grid. There are different ways to achieve the same goal musically in Renoise, so maybe more n00b orientated workflow tutorials could be beneficial.

I imagine that besides being a subjective issue, any gui of a new program takes time to master and appreciate (you’ll have to consult the manual at some point). The fact that you don’t have to crawl through multiple windows in Renoise is a plus imo. If you’re (= the devs) thinking about gui change for an upcoming release, other then a left sided browser ala Fl Studio I wouldn’t need a change.

Fl Studio 8 has a ‘click to enable online news’ tab option now, that can be switched on to receive news for downloadable content or whatever while you’re creating tracks. Maybe something similar could be setup for Renoise related news/tips/renoise users song streaming/new posts in forum or in-depth stories?

To conclude I think the amount of changes we have already seen is amazing, this gives me confidence for the future. Maybe the main problem is you hardly get any tracker n00bs since Renoise isn’t marketed enough! Get some good stuff on youtube.

8

I think the whole drag and drop feature should be removed.

I mean, I’ve always used cut/copy paste, now, if I selec something I wanna copy/cut, and want to reselect it with the mouse (drag the mouse over it while holding the left mousebutton in) I always end up dragging whatever I chose.

It’s frustrating!

9

Edit → Preferences → GUI → Delayed Drag’n’Drop

10

That’s gold, Jerry. GOLD!!!

No but seriously, I didn’t know that.
Thanks :)

11

Thanks for the feedback so far guys!

To summarize the most obvious points: you all think that we definitely need more video tutorials, many people get confused by the Speed/TPL at first (no wonder) and that an arranger would be dope (or put Renoise to a new level - which doesn’t always has to be a good thing).

Give us more!

12

i love renoise and i love the way it makes me think about how i make music. i love how music made with it can mutate into the unknown as you unfold it. i love that i can bash stuff out super fast and i love that i dont have to listen back to my beats to know they will sound phat because i know they will because i bashed in the right info. i love the lfo plugin and i think ableton should copy it.

if i was going to commit to it as my primary music making program then i would need a piano roll and i would need to be able to slice audio into bits quickly, so right now i only use it for drum programming and sample collage.

13

I only started using renoise really once the linux beta’s came out. I had tried it once or twice previously on windows, but only briefly. I’ve used other linux music stuff, especially rosegarden, but I don’t feel the need to return to the piano roll at all, I find the renoise interface super-efficient.

To start with I used the tutorials from Computer Music magazine (UK), from an issue some time last year. This enabled me to grasp the basics pretty quickly. I’ve picked up some other stuff from watching video’s here and on youtube. I’ve learnt the most be experimenting myself. I’ll try to give you an idea of the features I’ve found less accessible so far…

I still struggle with assembling my patterns into a song, I clearly need to read some more…, I tend to have to undo things that appear ‘wierd’ to me, like if I delete a pattern, then renumber another one to the old number, my old pattern data reappears. Clearly there are sensible things going on here, but sometimes I’m surprised by what happens. What do the numbers mean, if they have no relevance to the playing order? Adding a pattern seems to copy the current one with the same number so I only ever clone. My statements probably sound ridiculous to more experienced users, but aim to demonstrate my confusion with this feature, clearly it’d help if I read the appropriate manual section, it’s just not entirely obvious otherwise. I get by, and I can get the results I need, but I’m most likely being inefficient.

I’ve never worked out what any of the features in the pane on the right of the pattern editor do (content mask, notes, instruments, etc). I guess this means I can get by without them, but maybe I’m missing something really important.

It took me a while to work out how to put together a multi-sampled instrument, I had to read the manual page a few times ;)

Other than giving me more spaces in each beat If I use speed 3 instead of 6, I’ve no idea of the merits of changing speed. I saw a discussion on the merits of speed 12, but I’ve no idea why this would be useful (even after reading it!).

Looking around I think I’ve got the hang of everything else, to at least some degree…

14

I’m too new, yet, to really offer much other than to say I was amazed at how quickly I learned the majority of the program (having never heard of a tracker or used one before – I come from a strictly DAW background and was looking for a tool to think about compositions differently). The automation is my favorite feature and I think it is implemented better than anything I’ve seen yet.

I really only have three wishes at this point.

I would like to see a beat slicer.
I would like the ability to use multiple audio ports for VSTis that support them.
I would like to be able to draw automation envelopes free form for some parameters (i.e. not snap to a grid – maybe this is already possible?).

At this point, I really love the tool. It’s quick, it’s solid, and it sounds great.

15

i’m a noob to renoise and trackers in general.

i really love everything about it…the concept and workflow makes sense and just clicks with me, and it’s helped me understand more how artists create all the crazy fast breakbeat music i love.

but the ONE THING i really wish for in a future version is a Beat Slicer. now i totally understand it doesn’t NEED one, and that you can accomplish everything a beat slicer does on your own. but to me with the advent of automatic beatslicers, it seems silly to not at least have it as an option.

IN MY OPINION, what would be great is a slicer that brings together the accuracy of slicing manually with the convenience of an automatic one. so you select the tool, then you can go thru a drum break (for example) and select all your slice points, then just push a button to make a drum kit out of your selected slices (Slice To Drum Kit ^__^)

and P.S. i know you can already do what i said at the end…but you can’t do it without a bunch of copying/pasting and that’s what i hate about it…i don’t want to copy and paste, i want to make music!

16

it’s looking like i’ll be learning the basics of renoise for my externship this session @ school, so i’ll make more posts if anything comes up. as long as the thread is still around. but first off, the most obvious is that tutorials should be aimed at people who are new to trackers, not just people migrating from one tracker to another. i’m new to production altogether, so seeing a tutorial that is for people who are used to trackers can be overwhelming, like klingon language. also, a pdf version of the manual would be great, so that the whole screen could be renoise.

17

I’ve been using Renoise for 2+ years now but I have big trouble with one thing, I can’t do those pattern sequences so you can just press play on your track and it will auto play through the track changing from each pattern its self until it gets to the end of the track etc, I mean I cant lay out a tune with all the extra dark colored pattern things? see this is what I mean I cant do it and don’t even know what its called :unsure:, bassicly being able to do a proper arrangement in Renoise.

What I do is have loads of patterns and then change from pattern to pattern live, I have Wavelab recording my tune live and then play around with Renoise live. Being able to lay out a tune which plays through all the patterns its self in Renoise is probably the hardest thing for a new person to learn, this is probably the tracker way? but its rather confusing for someone like me who has never used a tracking program before I got into Renoise, I know nearly everything else in Renoise expect this what I just explained.

I’ve come from using Drum Machines, Synths, Groove boxes, Logic and QBase for software and big mixing desks.

Hope it helps with your development.

18

I love being able to do everything by keyboard. I also love the automation features in Renoise.

My biggest gripe with trackers is the difficulty they have handling long samples. I understand this is an inherent problem, but I think it should be addressed in whatever way the developers see best fitting.

Also, specifically for Renoise, there needs to be a way to play a selected area other than using the block feature or play from cursor, which can be painful. I want to be able to select a group of lines and have them play in a loop.

19

This is the first tracker I have used and I bought Renoise after playing with the demo on Linux. My background is in using traditional sequencers. Ive been learning and playing with Renoise for about a month.

What you love…

Linux Port: Ive been using Linux for about 2 years and this is by far the best port. Thank you again for bringing this to Linux.

The speed: The fact I that I hardly have to touch my mouse (even though it makes the learning curve greater) is a big plus.

Single Interface: No windows to open, rearrange, minimize. Using the F Keys to move around is very cool.

Always Zoomed In: I like that Im always dealing with maximum resolution instead of zooming in, editing and zooming out.

Sampler: Definitely like how a sampler is built into Renoise.

What you hate…

I dont hate anything about Renoise.

What took a long time to understand…

The whole tracker concept. This is the first tracker Ive bought and used. There was a really long thread at KVR about Renoise and trackers. When I realized trackers work from the bottom up; the other way around to sequencers it made sense to learn it.

What not…

Using keys instead of a mouse to navigate around is cool :D

Whats still a misery for you…

Playing long samples when starting in the middle of a pattern. When JACK sync is implemented it will be a non issue because I could sync Renoise with Ardour or QTractor.

What should be changed to make existing features more prominent and easier….

I don’t know enough about Renoise to suggest anything. Every time, so far, Ive thought of a problem reading up, asking in IRC and experimenting has solved it.

Which tools in Renoise seem totally useless to you (just bloat the interface)…

Again nothing. It all seems to be very well thought out.

Which tools do you miss…

Being able to jam with patterns in real time (EnergyXT, Live)
The ability to make my own macro’s of functions (Reaper)
Docking VST’s (EnergyXT)

Feature requests…

Besier curved sampler envelopes.
“Timestretch” and “Tape” play options in the sampler.
Pattern Arranger.

Keep up the good work :D

20

I am a professional producer using Pro Tools and tons of expensive hardware. At the studio we are evaluating the demo version of Renoise, because one guy from another crew had it on his laptop and I was very excited by the speed he could do advanced drums programming.

I have heard the word “tracker” before, but I thought they were some kind of file sharing software. The way Renoise works is news to me.

What you love…

  • That you can see what goes on in many tracks at the same time
  • The fast control of samples with simple textvalues from anywhere on the timeline
  • The fast way to mute/solo tracks by clicking on the spectrum-analyser windows

What you hate…

  • We were all surprised to find that we couldn’t save to regular midi files?
  • We couldn’t find a way to sync Renoise to our other music tools. No ReWire?

What took a long time to understand…

The pattern effects commands and the way to enter notes on the QWERTY keyboard.

Whats still a misery for you…

It’s easy to create fragments of music in Renoise. Short “patterns”. But I find it difficult to go beyond the few loops concept and get to the overview you have in traditional sequencers. As I understand it, you are working on some sort of arranger. That is really the missing link and the key to getting that overview.

What should be changed to make existing features more prominent and easier…

Renoise is marketed as a “bottom-up” sequencer, but this only works for a few steps “up”. You need to have a better arranger, it’s almost impossible to continue sequencing “up” beyond a certain limit.

Which tools do you miss… Feature requests…

Arranger, midi export, rewire.

Overall verdict:
We give Renoise a 75% rating today. With an arranger, midi export or rewire (some way of proper communication with other softwares) we would give it a 95%. I personally see this piece of software as a masterpiece of engineering. Many kudos to Taktik!

I look forward to buy multiple licenses for this software when it has more arranging features and I’ll recommend this software to other music producers to check out.