My name is Martin and I am a new user of Renoise from the Greater Toronto Area in Canada. I got my 2.5 beta - 3.5 license as a Christmas gift to myself. I make all kinds of music, but envisage using Renoise mostly for my electronic music project, Umbriel Rising.
Although I am new to Renoise, I am not new to making music and computer recording, having started out in the mid 80s with a Kawai K1 synth, a second hand DX11, a guitar, Boss DR550 drum machine and a Fostex 4 track, I studied Music Tech at University for 3 years and learnt how to set up micing, splice analogue tape, work 24 track 2" tape recorders and big ticket mixers (Neve and SSL) etc and then got into early Cubase on Atari ST. I worked in studios for 6 years in the 90s during the ADAT and early computer revolution days of mostly MIDI apps (but Paris and early Protools versions also) but the amount of hard work for peanuts eventually led me to a ‘proper’ job when the cool factor wore off So now, I just do my own stuff and occasional mix/remix/mastering for friends and clients. I also play keyboard, guitars and bass still for fun but also enjoy combining this with samples etc (no ‘I must play it all by hand’ snobbery here )
I also own and love Cubase 5 and Ableton Live 7, which are more feature rich tools than Renoise, but I like the GUI and simplicity of setting up things using Renoise which surprised me. I have much to learn and still am making some noob mistakes and scratching my head quite a bit, but already I have done a couple of decent tracks with it (albeit rewired to Live) and look forward to doing so much more…The last time I had a tracker app was OctaMED on the Amiga - yikes !!
Can you guys with more Renoise experience share with me a couple of things you really love about the app, and also, maybe a couple of features you’d like to see enhanced or added in future releases. Merci beaucoup !
Low CPU usage and ability to build complex dsp-chains made Renoise my fav daw. And I also agree with BotB that one of the best things about Renoise is that it’s very HEXy
Hmm… But as I’m working on a track with vocals at the moment I really miss better support for long sounds… And I’m too broke to buy Reaper at the moment…
Some important features that make Renoise ideal for me are mainly:
ReWire support. This super-feature enables me to use the tracker interface to control my Reason racks and sync Renoise to other DAWs (which I use mainly for mixing/mastering and big audio files handling).
Renoise’s XML data structures. Since you can paste the clipboard data into a textfile, this means you can build huge banks of XML data and store it to your harddrive. Just paste it back into the tracker when you need it…
The coming scripting in version 2.6… yeah, this has to be the most exciting feature of them all. The Master Ring, so to speak. With this feature, taktik really lives up to his nickname by magnitude. This is THE tactical feature that hopefully will unleash the potential powers of the Renoise nerds.
You know, I have some friends that are Reason Power users. When I show them how FAST I manage to program e.g. a drum sequence in Reason (that is, after slaving Reason to Renoise via ReWire), they get pretty jealous. But the cool thing is, if Renoise’s 2.6 scripting capabilities ship with a back-door for reading and writing to disc, Renoise as a tool for fast composing will enter a new level of speed that makes other musical software look like a child’s toy by comparison.
The reason for this is that we can then write auto-generators, new little tools that speed up the composing process even further. For example, that kind of stuff that software such as Cognitone’s Synfire Pro handles today…
There are so many things in 2.5, it is very hard for me to say at such early stages, “what I like best.” I haven’t even checked out 95% of the new features yet.
I love the GUI tweaks. They add to what was already a very cool virtual music environment. I also like the workflow tweaks: The pattern arranger, and the new and improved buttons and shortcuts, that can be found, “all over, and throughout the application.”
Later today, tonight, or tomorrow I wish to have a look at the amp/cabinet models. Hopefully they are awesome.
Hey, check out what Temper does with shapes - that’s what I’d like to see in Renoise. Shapes are like LFOs with really smart waveforms that you can tweak live and then apply to note pitch, velocity, note length, controllers etc on selected notes. As said you can tweak the waveform while playing and when you’re happy, save it. To get this in Renoise and Reaper I would …
now i reached a point where i really need some real routing.
i just got my hands on some vsti which is able routing stuff through
another vsti via midi-output. i can’t do this in renoise (??).
energyXT is able to do so, but loading this into renoise as vsti
and then plug another 2 vsti’s into energyXT isn’t really the best way
but its the only alternative atm.
keep it up bois, you’ll get a great routing done, soon i hope
I love renoise for the fact that you can see exactly what you are doing. You know exactly where the hi hat is, and its so easy to tweak. If helped me to understsand timing, because you are the quantize pretty much.
And plus, when people ask you what software you use, you can show them, and they have no idea what the fack all those numbers are and why it is scrolling down instead of left-right.
Honestly, this isn’t even a lie. In absolute truth, when I saw this thread on the forum I cliked on it already planning to respond saying “Offer an interface option that lets users choose between had and REAL NUMBERS THAT MAKE SENSE”.
I hate hex. And I’ve been using trackers since scream tracker. My suggestion:
If the user chooses to work with numbers, the columns in the pattern editor will be 3 characters long instead of to, with a range of 001 to 999. Now THAT makes SENSE. Or make it from whatever 00 - FF is in numbers.
Anyways, many people can’t divide hex in their head easily, and it would make it much more intuitive for many people.
So now, I just do my own stuff and occasional mix/remix/mastering for friends and clients. I also play keyboard, guitars and bass still for fun but also enjoy combining this with samples etc (no ‘I must play it all by hand’ snobbery here 
)
