I am no noob in general as I use trackers since the good old protracker days on my amiga. But as this is an open discussion about what’s really cool and what’s not in renoise I will spend my 0.02 Euro, too.
I love how fast you get some nice beats with renoise. The GUI is just perfect, no hassle of how to find an instrument or an effect (I still did not manage to get Logic to use my VSTis) and if you come from an oldschool-mod-tracker like me, you will feel “home” quite fast.
I teached some of my friends the basics in renoise and all have the same problems:
adding patterns
adding new instruments (that instrument-slot is cool but most total n00bs don’t realize it’s there)
creating the sequence
VST-Effects (where are they?) compared to VSTi
Tickspeed (why 3 or 6 or 12)
I think these are the biggest obstacles when a total n00b comes to renoise. Oh and “note-off” is also a huge problem I realized why teaching others.
The thing that really annoys me at renoise is the missing quantisation when entering notes life. I don’t have too huge delay times but I always have to fix notes after entering them live. And the long-sample-problem, mentioned before is also weird.
Overall: Renoise is great. Easier to understand than any other D.a.w I think…
The 1.9.1 demo is my third attempt at understanding Renoise and thanks to all the videos and help from the forums I think I finally “get it.”
As everybody else said, working with multiple patterns is very confusing and I’ve already lost some work due to overwriting or getting the pattern numbers confused.
Speed/BPM is becoming clearer…
One thing that annoys me is the disk browser setup. It takes about 20 clicks to get to the desktop! Saving songs is fine, but it has it’s own popup window. I’d love a shortcut system in the bisk browser (if it isn’t there already).
Also, as someone who loves to use a lot of VSTi, a rack location showing all the VSTi that are in use would be nice. Maybe just a small section with “thumbnails” of the editors that when clicked would open the original or Renoise version of the editor? I won’t be using multiple monitors any time soon and would love to keep the one window/full screen thing going.
The sample editor is freakin’ great.
One of the main things that continues to draw me to Renoise is the enormous amount of support that is available (this thread is a perfect example). This kind of interest and help is priceless!!
I still remember, that i found it a bit confusing that one needs special devices to record automation from VST plugins. that’s quite a difference to other hosts i’ve tried at that time. Otherwise i felt pretty “at home”.
There’s this “house”-icon which brings you to your home-directory. And by selecting paths and rightclicking the (1), (2), (3) buttons you can set up shortcuts.
I like in renoise pretty much everything, but bothers me that i can’t save renoise dsp effect tweakings as a preset so i make my own default presets and can save them and load them, pretty annoyng is always start from start all the time.
I’ve played with trackers before (Scream, Impulse) and like those Renoise is very fast for building short loops, snippets and drums but gets increasingly messy when one tries to make whole song. I’ve understood that arranger is in the works so that’s nice.
I would want to change note velocities visually (by drawing) instead of typing but I haven’t found a way yet. It would be nice if effect values had some visual way to edit them (drag number with a mouse and number changes to pie chart to visually show min and max values). Typing hexadecimal is slow when changes are subtle and it’s hard to see big picture with plain numbers (curves are good for overall view).
Navigation is bit slow and keyboard-centric: double/middleclick in pattern doesn’t move cursor to actual click point (like effect value or velocity).
I miss the piano roll for partial transponing and chord editing (also for visual note delay edits).
Visualization of note length (as a colored blocks) would make patterns faster to read, and maybe note velocities could be optionally shown as editable bars/pies.
I would love to automatically pitch slide to next note (or some other pitch) instead of calculating note slide effect values in my head. Effect value editor with note names would be good solution too (see above).
I think arpeggio and other such effects should work with VSTis/MIDI. Better yet Renoise could have an arpeggiator for sending chords as arps to VSTis/MIDI gear.
I miss layered samples in instruments and the ability to edit envelopes without grid.
I would like to insert and humanize notes between rows. Note delay effect has no visual feedback (maybe it could offset note between rows a few pixels) and for me speed setting feels archaic.
And it would be nice to have very long samples (like minutes) but maybe this comes with the arranger.
I love Renoise for the ability to tweak everything at low level. Such amount of control is great but bigger picture is currently bit problematic.
The numbers are the ‘names’ of the patterns
Three 6s beneath each other would mean you play pattern 6 three times
I’m not sure if there’s somewhere where you can see which patterns you’ve got, because removing a pattern from the sequence doesn’t remove it from the memory.
if you click and drag on the line of the sequence box you can expand an option to give the patterns your own names, which is alot easier to handle.
if all your numbers get jumbled after a while, there’s a Sort Pattern Sequence option which automatically renumbers your patterns logically (the top pattern being 0, and then counting from there). You can get to this option by right-clicking in the sequence editor.
quite frankly, I don’t get this whole subject about the difficulty of creating complex arrangements inside Renoise; I often compose orchestral songs which can be longer than 10 minutes, using more than 100 patterns.
ok, of course I have long experience with trackers, but I think that complex arrangements can be easily done in Renoise. I respect the point of view of people who find this task difficult, but honestly I don’t agree with them
I agree, it’s not difficult, once you manage, how this “pattern ↔ sequence” thing works. But for a complete noob it is not very obvious that a “pattern” is just a part of a “sequence”
Full Ack. I agree that many newbies install Renoise or similar and think: “Now I am a great musician”. Some of them quit, because they do not manage to RTFM and enter weird basslines or stuff like that.
not much to say but: SAME HERE
my tracks are not 10 minutes long, but with the high bpm’s, tracks often have 100+ patterns
you can even LABEL the patterns to keep track (har har har) of where you are in your composition.
try to label different sections of the composition, so that you know what happens where
So all you long-term/expert users say “I don’t see a problem with this”, but a number of newcomers mention the pattern/sequencing issue. It’s true to say that every aspect of the program is fine if you RTFM, but much of renoise is easy enough to work out without resorting to the documentation, and with practice I have got the hang of using the sequencer.
When I first tried (and before reading the doc’s) some of the behaviour did seem very strange though. E.g. I click ‘add pattern’ but I get a copy of the previous pattern, so I delete the data from it, only to find it’s been deleted from the previous pattern too. It’s trivial to an experienced user, but I bet a lot of first timers have the same problem. RTFM is not a solution if you’re genuinely looking at improving ease of use as taktic’s initial post suggests.
Agreed. Arranging isn’t intuitive from the get go, I struggled with the exact same thing when I first tried Renoise.
‘Sort pattern sequence’ can be confusing as well I guess, since this re-numbers patterns into a consecutive order…but doesn’t actually ‘sort’ the existing patterns. If you have: 1-2-4-3-5,…selecting ‘sort pattern sequence’ will re-number that sequence to 1-2-3-4-5. What you’ve tracked in pattern 4 is now renamed pattern 3. When I think of sorting, I don’t expect this behavior. Not a big deal or something, but a lill strange maybe
While it is of course possible to work with the current arranger, it could be sooo much better in terms of overview and functionality. Again I’ll refer to Fl Studio’s method of arranging; there the patterns & playlist (where you arrange the patterns) are separate and I think if Renoise incorporated the same method it would win epically. You could just sketch a few different ideas and lay them on the side, and drag 'em in an arrangement if needed.
Right now your ideas/patterns are always part of the same linear chain. Even though re-ordering is a simple mouse-drag away…when you come back to an old renoise project…visually you can’t really see the arrangement or get a grasp of what you were aiming for without listening (some might say this is a +). So, yeah you can add a name to a pattern and give a description, but still you’re looking at a ‘monophonic’ representation of a polyphonic composition
I’ve been doing it the oldschool tracker way since protracker, but can’t wait to see the next evolutionary step.
I remember long time ago (in 1996) I load “touch of the spring” s3m by Purple Motion to my Fast Tracker 2 and this was be unforgettably. 
