Voting For New Features After 2.0

General Discussion
1

It has been announced that the voting should start again, once the 2.0 goes gold.
Well, that’s important.

Because our decisions will (again) help shape the most versatile, geek-friendly and ‘the-edge-of-the-art’ music app on the market so far (I just hope most users will agree with this definition).

Therefore I’d like to sharpen this community’s attention to what we’re going to vote for, while there’s still time to let it boil over in our highly electrified brains.

You would probably agree if I said that tracking means to most of us - ‘easily do stuff other apps sweat or suck at’ - or - ‘be (much) more creative in (much) less time than with other apps out there’.

OK, do you remember where this tracking freedom came from? It came from simplistic, most logically straightforward (and therefore not so user-friendly) interface approach.
I mean, we couldn’t do sophisticated sample editing in ImpulseTracker, but did it stop us from making music? No! Contrary: it helped us!
No, we couldn’t ‘visually arrange’ long WAV’s quite comfortably in FT2 - but if we could, wouldn’t it take significantly more time that it did, to make a track?

Tracking was always about 'being able to do more music with less stumbling over trivial technicalities.’

Renoise has always kept this spirit.
Now we’re asking for more - what? Comfort? Or more Renoise? There is a huge difference.
Comfort means something we can already do, but we just ask for a more easier way of doing it.
Whereas ‘more Renoise’ would mean things that are essentially not there yet, but might take this program to newer venues (still maintaining the tracker worldview).

As far as l understand, there are several key features most likely to end up on the future request list. Among them, the arranger thing, the xrns structure and some more tweaks.

I don’t want to stress any feature as more or less important right now.
I just want to make us think (again), about what’s more important for us as (aspiring) computer musicians:
is it the things we really can’t work without, or things we already can achieve in Renoise, but they require more mind- and fingerwork?
I mean, think about it.
Do we want an arranger just because our guitar piece is longer than whole song, and we can’t be bothered to cut it up?
Or do we want a bigger offset because we cannot be bothered to increase bpm’s and step length?
Excuse me, are we still tracking or what?

I remember nagging very much about the improper routing as it was in the past versions of Renoise.
Or when I couldn’t send notes and a carrier signal to a vocoder plug.
Yeah, I did nag. And I already felt ashamed for it, because of how sharp this tracker already looked. In fact I remember paying $55 for it and feeling ashamed for other companies not charging as much for their - way more inferior to Rn - apps.
Still, those were the features I could not emulate, or go about using other Renoise features. They were sort of essential to the core engine.

But with the arranger or the offset - dude, I just don’t see a problem there, really. Wanna see me laying a 20 minute guitar take over a song? Or slicing it up in 99 pieces in sampler editor? No problem with that.

Working with a program I usually teach myself to think this way: ‘Ok, there isn’t a simpler way to achieve this. But can I achieve the same thing using it’s other features?’
And that’s why I’m still using trackers (instead of the hyperbloated ‘pro’ apps.) And you know what? I still manage to make a living from it, occasionally.

So, I’d say: fellows, let’s just vote for the stuff we really can’t do without. Let’s not ask Renoise to follow our ‘customer whims’ like a malformed mass-market crap.
Among the features that are supposed to simply increase our - already more than there - ‘user comfort’, let’s think about the features that can’t be anywhere but in trackers.

Thik about the ways we can use Renoise in a live situation, for example. Think about instant pattern launching, or scripts for hot-key transport control. Ok, xrns layers, envelope control.
I mean, don’t just ask for comfort features or minor tweaks for gossakes! There is so much comfort in there already, you can ditch a week of work and not notice!

Let’s forget the trivial, and bring forward the edgecutting things, folks.

2

A Mixer view
(712 Credits)

An Arranger view (visually arrange PatternSequences and Blocks)
(655 Credits)

Audio recording in the SampleEditor
(645 Credits)

Sub-tick timing
(587 Credits) Right?

Improved Instrument (RNI) structure
(571 Credits)

A Better and bigger disk browser
(548 Credits)

More Modulation Meta Devices
(542 Credits)

More (and more complex) MIDI mappings
(479 Credits)

A Renoise VST plug
(423 Credits)

A Piano Roll view
(414 Credits)

Renoise as ReWire Slave
(370 Credits)

DirectX Plugins support [Windows]
(338 Credits) (does anyone still care for this?

Renoise as ReWire Master
(332 Credits)

Audio-Units support [Mac]

This is from the old vote, where what’s already been implemented has been strike through.

I would add :

midi controllable gui (for live usage of Renoise)

Better large sample file handling (stream from disk?)

pimped automation editor (drawing automation over multiple patterns etc etc)

Beatslicer (lol)

3

I totally agree with you guys and I think renoise is (for me now) complete.
Next step for me would be looking how to get things done live :D

4

the only biggie for me.

nice to hear the long midi recordings if you are somewhere else as the trigger.
this should bring much faster and easier editing in the sample.

5

i agree

now with PDC

and support for multi-out vstis

renoise is complete for me too

just a few very minor things is missing for me

but im sure they will come in the final version

6

I agree with the sentiment that Renoise 2.0 took care of a lot of fundamentals. It rocks. And we should be taking a deep look as a community as to what it means to track.

But, I also think it’s important to realize that votes navigate things, but aren’t the end all of the development process.

Renoise is essentially one guy’s product, and he’s not our slave. He respects our opinion but at the end of the day he gets to make decisions he wants, maybe because he has a vision, or maybe because he’s bored and wants to do something else because it’s easier, whatever.

He’s the captain, and he gets a lot of respect as he gives respect to us in spades.

For example, OS X got it’s long overdue Audio Unit support (thank you!). It was low on the vote list, but 2.0 being a “fundamentals” release it’s kind of ridiculous to claim multi-platform support for so long and leave OS X user hanging for just as long. So, expect something like “JACK Transport Support” to usurp it’s way into the priorities regardless of yours or mine.

Furthermore, I keep hearing things like “proper routing” but what’s proper? Send tracks, as they are, make the most sense to me. You want to route a send track back into another regular track? Well, that pretty easy already. Set up a Line-In device to receive input from a virtual routing device, and set the output of a Send Track to the virtual output. On OS X it’s called Soundflower.

This isn’t the era of DOS where your computer runs one app at a time. There are creative solutions out there. Proper routing is a “creative solution” as it’s relatively new yet people expect some copy of some other DAW that wasn’t around a few years ago?

I’m not saying there isn’t room for “proper routing” but what is that? You can already route signals, with a bit of creativity, as described above. So is it Sidechaining we want? So we want a plug-in that works with Renoise then? Can’t someone write that then?

As proposed, I will think long and hard about what I want to vote for. But for now, I will continue to make music, as the opportunity to make the best music I possibly can has arrived with 2.0

Good times.

7

One of the reasons why i spend so many points on AU plugins during the voting round, i don’t even own a Mac but i know AU plugins are part of the fundamental plugin-system on the Mac, that’s why.
The reason why it was so low was because there were probably not too many Mac users at the time. The voting took place after the first Mac OSX supported release so there were probably not too many registered Mac users to add a big influence to the priority of this feature.

8

Well, if you ask me, I’d say, [b]THIS[/b] is the proper routing.

Oh, and please note the yellow lines, they are the MIDI routing.

But, since Renoise has not chosed a modular path (which is not the most reasonable of choices, if you ask me again), I will not flood this topic with far-fetched concepts.

9

will need add rewire option

10

I think we should adopt a new way of making suggestions overall in this forum: always check the idea/suggestion’s meta-status by asking the question: “Can I get this feature from any 3rd party plugin out there?”

This is good for two reasons. First of all it maps out which features are inherently linked to Renoise’s core engine and which are not. Secondly it forces us to check for existing solutions on the market and report back to this community what these solutions are.

Personally, I think that all features that already can be delivered by existing 3rd party plugins, scripts or applications, shouldn’t be expected to be coded by Renoise core developers at all. And in regard to scripts, there’s plenty to be done by more of us.

11

Renoise 2.0 is actually complete product. It has everything you would have wanted. It’s a greatest tracker program ever made. But what about Renoise 3.0?

Let’s take a look around other popular programs. Browsers for example. Many people use IE because it’s bundled with windows. Renoise is not bundled with windows and probably never will be. (Renoise demo version may get to be bundled with linux, I wouldn’t be too surprised).

Other popular Browser is firefox. Why? Because it’s fast, because it’s functional and because it’s hyped a lot. Sure. But new great browsers come and other older ones gather similar functionality… Why people still keep their firefox. Extensions! Firefox has tons of extensions, it’s highly customizable. You have any functionality you want with just few mouse clicks. And if new browser comes (like chrome), you test it a bit, it feels nice but it is missing the functionality of some extension you really relied on.

Renoise needs extendability. I would really love to port my Chord finder directly into renoise. Or add functionality like Freesound.org browser. Or maybe Myspace uploader? Or maybe video editor, which communicated with editor binaries via the extension? Or organized Instrument library? Or song synchronizer? You name it!

And everyone chooses which extensions they use if any. And Taktik gets a big stress relief, as people don’t bug him so much rather than bugging me or some other extension author. At the same time, new features pour in like never before. :)

This is not true that we don’t have people in our community who would be interested in developing the extensions. We have plenty.

12

Improved RNI structure! I’d love to make instruments more modular, but more importantly, i’d LOVE to be able to map even, say 8 samples on one key… it’d be a great way to create amazing pads or layered drums… and if we could make the instruments trigger different samples based on midi velocity input, well, that would be the bees knees. :) This definitely has MY vote!

13

yeah i would like an opption to automate the entire song,instead of pattern by pattern

14

Hi!
Big Up for all the Renoise team! :guitar:

I’m using Renoise for composition, also I use it for live sessions.

It could be great to have some features for Live sessions, here is 2 simple ideas :

  • preselection of some channels before muting or unmuting at the same time.

  • possibility to have a tabbed user interface for opening and playing modules simultaneously and for exchanging data between them, like the great open source tracker called MilkyTracker ( http://www.milkytracker.net/?about )

Thanxs and long live! :walkman:

BreemiX

15

Well, people are not interested in scripts for renoise. But people are interested in… Let’s say… Beatslicer? An instrument library? Sidechain processor? Chord entry? Song optimizer? Whatever.

These all could be scripted. I personally have many ideas to script. But it’s hard to do if you don’t have direct access to the internals. And embedding every idea what someone might like would be bad idea as it adds to bloatness factor.

Right now we have solid core. We will also have pianoroll and arranger which will make the program more feasible to many new artists. But why to waste time on small thingies which can easily be scripted while they can be… Well… Easily scripted. :)

No point in making something like buzz. Buzzmachines and everything. Nowadays we have VST and AU and LADSPA for these things. I mean extensions like firefox. Which can add functionality: buttons, menus and little GUI windows in environment, make custom actions like filter notes, filter sample data, set instrument parameters, etc.

Rough beatslicer snippet:

  
Button slicerButton = new Button(doSlice);  
SampleEditor.addButton("Slice to Fourths", slicerButton);  
  
function doSlice(){  
 Sample s = SampleEditor.getCurrentSample();  
 Instrument instrument = InstrumentEditor.getCurrentInstrument();  
 instrument.registerUndo();  
 // Calculate chunk size (1/4 beat)  
 int chunkSize = (60 / Song.getTempo() / 4) * (s.getSampleRate() * s.getRelativeTranspose());  
 int from = 0;  
 while(true){  
 int to = from + chunkSize;  
 if(to > s.sampleData.length()){  
 to = s.sampleData.length();  
 }  
 Sample newSample = new Sample(s.sampleData[from:to - from]);  
 instrument.addSample(newSample);  
 from = to;  
 }  
 instrument.removeSample(s);  
 instrument.generateDrumkit();  
}
16

btw I vote for new beatbattle :slight_smile:

17

no offense to the pianoroll fans but… errr, renoise is a “tracker”

18

Is it? I thought Renoise is a DAW with tracker interface. :)

19

what’s a piano?

20

88 pieces of wooden sticks disguised as a cow.

Rumor has it that piano 2 will feature a bell to make it even more realistic. :dribble:

Oh, and I’ll just vote for improved RNI structure I think.