Piano roll is less of an issue because we do have a couple of plugins for it, but… the ux of the software.
Just like I have mentioned from the KVR forum, I found there are so many “short by one features” preventing Renoise to be epic, which is really sad. And here is the list from the kvr post, with a couples of extras:
- It has VST support, but the note fx doesn’t support MPE.
- It has Delay Compensation, but for some reasons, it arbitrarily capped at 100 ms which is not useful for some of the sample libraries.
- It has a cool sample editor, but you can’t have stack and round robin sample at the same instrument instance.
- I love their vst sampling feature, but I am not sure why the loop point in the loop sampling mode has to be in the dead center, but most of the time, the transition between transient and sustain are not always at the middle: we can have a very short transient and long cycles of sustains and vice versa; as a result, I had to manually set the loop point instead.
- It has a cool phrase editor for each instruments, but sadly, it doesn’t support midi cc output, missed an opportunity to change articulations by switching the phrase.
- It has scripting, but we can’t create instrument plugin playing in real time other than sample it.
- The infamous two line per scroll
- I understand to makes some older users feel familiar with their tracker, but it would be much better if there are templates to let user choose the hot keys because it is really difficult to change the shortcuts on a tiny key mapper windows with fully packed hot keys that can easily conflicts one another.
I can certainly tell it is a problem of UX because I have multiple music making software, and I have no problem switching between SunVox, Furnace, FL Studio, and even musescore, regularly, but I still have a lot of struggles on using Renoise in particular due to the issues above.
Considering how old Renoise is, some of them might be difficult and might require to rewrite the feature, but increasing the delay compensation limit, able to define the loop point on sampling vsts, offering some basic templates for the hotkeys for suiting new or experienced users seems highly approachable, and these three improvements could already reduce a lot of pain on writing orchestral tracks on renoise.
I don’t get what you mean by “more suited for genres with samples” you can make any genre with samples
I think I kinda get what Carles means. It is surely can write any genre if you have put the effort into Renoise, but definitely, some of the genre are more difficult than others because of the limitations. Slicing a beat to make breakbeat? Easy! You can just load a beat and use a command to change the sample playhead. How about writing a Thomas Bergersen Style Epic music like Heart of Courage? Because of the issues above, writing one is already exponentially more difficult, and I had to use so many workarounds just to get the job done, or the worst, I have to export the samples as an xm instrument and working the track in SunVox.
in fact I’d say R and trackers force you to learn how to sample, if you are only using vsts synths for your insts imo you are wasting potential
I am afraid this might not be true because sampling is not a sliver bullet for every sounds which it has a trade off, your memory storage. Sampling a simple synth pluck sounds is a non issue because these sounds are simple, and you don’t need many sample to make it sound convincing; in fact, you can just load a saw way with the built-in filter. However, not all sounds are simple, especially working with orchestral libraries. Try to imagine to sample a string library where their staccato have 9 different round robin, where you have to sample 5 instrument groups, from their lowest to highest notes with all the variations. As a result, after I have sampled the full orchestra, and each sound contains 4 variants of staccato, and a sustain, all of these samples are already taken up more than 500 mb! Unlike kontakt libraries, we have to save all the sample independently for every project, so you can see how bad it scales if I have sampled my instruments more deeply, and working on more orchestral projects.
In addition, Renoise looks like a tracker targeting to the “professional” audience, judging by the mixer, vst support and scripting, so I don’t see how Renoise should be a tracker that forces you to learn sampling. If I need a tracker that focus on sample but not the vst plugin, I keep on using SunVox instead and wouldn’t bought Renoise (which I expect to use plugins) in the first place.
Edit 1: Oh, it turns out TakTik is working on the midi out for redux and I have missed it, that’s an awesome news! Thus, my point for redux missing midi out is no longer valid.
, I print those effects with “render sample dsp chain” function anyway
you’re right sampling is not practical for every use case, it’s just perfectionism that I’m still breaking on my end, I loathe big sample libraries too, and I just said that about vst instruments because I use them in another daw (Ableton Lite), to design my samples and thus instruments because I always felt the performance of them is honestly not the best in renoise, (fx vsts are fine, but still some people report bugs and slowdowns sometimes) and a big selling point of R are pattern commands. So all these concepts mean different things to everyone, we all have different workflows and at the end of the day we are always evolving and hopefully making things easier for ourselves.
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