I like the portable apps site. www.portableapps.com. I can run quality applications from my flash drive. Would be cool to see Renoise that way. Meaning I could make me tunes anywhere on any machine. The only problem would be the vst’s.
Discuss.
I always carry around one Gig USB with renoise (demo version in case it leaks, don’t render on the road anyway) together with some basic samples.
works fine for me, since VST would be a problem, I don’t see much advantage aside of the fact you don’t have to install Renoise.
you can install Renoise in one minute on other machines (you have to install the DEMO version, since your license does not allow you to install Renoise registered on machines which you don’t own). You can also keep your configuration XML files save on the USB device and overwrite the default ones in order to use your configuration.
Well, you can edit config.xml to use relative paths for the VST (e.g. "…\VST"). But Renoise prolly wouldn’t know where to look for config.xml if it’s not properly installed - I haven’t tried that out yet, I I’ll uninstall it from my Laptop and see what I can work out. maybe a .bat file that creates a .reg file which tells Renoise to look for the config stuff on the USB stick…?
The trick about a portable though is that it writes absoluely no settings to the machine, everything is and stays on the the USB stick. This would be pretty slick: portable studio!
BUT… I guess tweaking Renoise so you don’t have to install it is obviously exactly the same as installing it. Of course you could ask them to sign something that says their computer now belongs to you before you plug in the USB, track away and remove the USB stick afterwards. Then you sign something that says you gave the computer back to the person who gave it to you. 
(No, I do not intend to do that and I do not recommend it, I am just thinking out loud.)
As Dr. Drips said the full version is not really needed anyway, as long as you can work on your tracks and save them with the demo, you can always render everything on a computer you own (you could compose huge tracks with infinite VSTs on the shiny PC of someone else, and then render them on your crappy laptop while watching a 90 minute movie or something 
).
And it shouldn’t be hard for people you’re showcasing it to to imagine how it would be if rendering and render selection to sample was enabled.
But yeah, not having to install anything would make a lot of areas more accessible to Renoise, so let’s check that out!
I still don’t get this: as soon as I can install a demo application on another PC in one minute, and replace two XML files in order to be able to start exactly as at home, it seems enough for me.
according to me, good portable applications are email clients which can let you access big email archives from within any computer.
maybe you could even be able to setup relative VST plugins and songs/samples paths in order to use freeware DLL-only plugins directly from USB, and a collection of samples and modules, but any other use would not make sense to me.
Of course it’s “enough”, nobody says Renoise would need to be portable to be any good
But there is still a difference between inserting the USB stick, waiting 5 seconds for it to show up, and just double clicking Renoise.exe - and “installing it in under one minute” and then having to copy files manually. A minute still is a minute, plus what if what you want to do with Renoise takes only 30 seconds anyway? And when you change your preferences, all you would have to do is to shut down Renoise and unmount the USB stick properly. No copying back of changed configuration, no uninstallation.
That would be what is called a portable app, but it’s not 100% possible for Renoise anyway: you never know what VST’s are up to! Writing into the registry and creating files on C:\ for example.
But wouldn’t that be quite cool? You say “any other use” as if this were a very limited subset of what you can do with Renoise… but surely there are many people who never use commerical VST’s, so that is ALL they ever do.
My suggestion so far:
When you start Renoise it creates the Application Data/Renoise folder. Quit Renoise, locate that folder and overwrite it with a prepared version from the USB stick containing your settings (and relative VST paths). When you are done, just the “Application Data/Renoise” folder, and don’t tell them that there might be junk left in the registry (but to be safe don’t do this with a registered version I guess).
This would be great for my laptop from work (which of course is not intended to be polluted with private software). It would also work in a school environment, a lot of students use Thunderbird mail portable edition on an USB stick at my university.
But even then I guess it’s only really useful when it’s Renoise Demo version (because of security) and if you use free VSTs (commercial VSTs you still have to install “properly” 9 in 10 times anyway). But I’m all for it as an install option.