25 ms·

Renoise – A DAW with a tracker-like interface

254 points by 1_player 5y ago

adamnemecek 5y ago
I'm working on an IDE for music composition. I'm releasing soon http://ngrid.io http://ngrid.io
- bigdict 5y ago
  please stop
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- 29athrowaway 5y ago
  Any previews?
gkhartman 5y ago
I'm always happy to see linux compatibility in DAW software. $75 seems like a reasonable price for a license. I'd love to hear HN community feedback on how this stacks up against Reaper (my current DAW) that's priced at $60 for personal use.
- jolux 5y ago
  Trackers are very, very different from the clip-manipulation style of Reaper/Logic/Pro Tools. They are typically seen as being best for electronic music, though this is partly historical. You would be learning a whole new workflow for a DAW.
  - TheRealPomax 5y ago
    *clip-manipulation and MIDI arrangement.
- colordrops 5y ago
  Bitwig is a competitor to Ableton made by ex-devs that runs on Linux, and better in some ways
  - fullstop 5y ago
    I gave my daughter a Nektar midi keyboard for her birthday, and it came with a license for Bitwig Studio. I saw that it was available on Linux and thought that this was fantastic. I'm sure that she'll get there eventually, but she's doing everything in Garage Band on an iPad at the moment. She's 13, so she's still learning the ropes here.
  - whiddershins 5y ago
    Has it ever become stable?
    - colordrops 5y ago
      Is it unstable for you? I've used it for a while without problems.
      - whiddershins 5y ago
        Haven't tried it in years.
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    I think the newer version even opens Live projects with varying results. You'll obviously have to swap out any stuff that came with Live since even the samples only open with the right license.
- antiterra 5y ago
  The main reason to use Renoise is if the tracker style sequencing is a productive process for you. I believe there’s a minimal version called Redux, but that changes the workflow. There is a free alternative. It isn’t native Linux and not as slick, but OpenMPT is meant to run in Wine and functions as a competent modern tracker.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  I haven't used Reaper, but from what I can tell it's a traditional DAW with a piano-roll interface (with the closest free/open-source alternative probably being Ardour). Renoise, on the other hand, is a DAW with a tracker interface. It's a very different workflow. I paid $75 for Renoise about 6 years ago and it's been great using it on Linux via Jack. It works flawlessly and is highly polished.. it's as good as any other commercial audio application that I've used, but it's very different from anything that's not a tracker. I use it in conjunction with a lot of VST plugins that I run through Wine and some native Linux plugins from u-he, which also work great. My impression is that most people use Renoise for making electronic music (which is how I use it too), for which it's very well suited. In my own experience, however, using the usual tracker workflow is not that great for manual exploration, however Renoise has lots of free third-party Lua scripts that can help with that, and it's also great for manipulating and sequencing samples. Here's a video on doing some advanced reverb processing with it: [1] Lots of ways to use it. The other thing I've heard that at least in older versions of Renoise (not sure how it is in the newest versions) it wasn't great for recording really long samples. So if you want to do something like record a live band's jam session or something you'll probably want to use something else. Renoise is best for working with shorter samples (or with synths or other VSTs or generating its own music). [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZnfyJqvM6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZnfyJqvM6s
  - chaboud 5y ago
    REAPER is basically a Vegas Pro clone. As one of the early Vegas devs and a Mac user, REAPER feels like home to me. It’s solid, and it’s my go-to for time-focused audio editing when I need to move quickly. However, as an old Scream Tracker user, seeing the sequence composition model alive today is a real treat. An entire lineage of loop timeline products owes its heritage to sequencers driving samplers, and it’s a really useful way to think about the macro structure of music. Somewhere in my garage there’s a pile of floppies full of mods waiting to be listened to.
    - GoofballJones 5y ago
      REAPER to me has been wonderful. Very light-weight and can do anything that the big ones do. It just doesn't come with a ton of it's own instruments and sounds like Ableton or Logic or others might. But if you have a ton of VSTs (like I do), it doesn't matter.
- bane 5y ago
  It's a very good DAW if you like using tracker interfaces. It supports sample-based tracking (the old Amiga style) and VSTis. It supports the usual sample effects, has it's own effects and can pretty comfortably use VST effects as well. I haven't dug super deep into it, but it has a lot of automation options, and some clever ideas, but it's a very complex tool. I'm not entirely sure it's worth all that over a piano roll style DAW, but it's probably the current pinnacle of tracker-style tech. It's very reasonably priced for what it is IMHO.
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    "it's a very complex tool" It's definitely not simple, but I wouldn't say it's any more complex than, say, Ableton. It's just a different workflow that more traditional DAW users aren't used to, so they'll have to learn. Fortunately there are a million great tutorials on it on youtube.
- megameter 5y ago
  Most trackers, Renoise among them, could be characterized as a standalone sequencer instrument with some DAW features. Renoise specifically is sampling-first. It has the gamut of typical sampler features and built-in effects, plus you have multiple ways to sequence everything(besides high-level pattern reuse across the song, you can abstract a lot of stuff into key-triggered sub-sequences or macro knobs). It has built-in effects, you can record automation curves and if you have something very specific in mind, there is Lua-based scripting and a little community of third-party scripts. In general, step sequencing is faster here than in any piano-roll based system, with the knock-on effect of it being extremely easy to build complex percussive sequences with a lot of timbral variation. Melodic lines and harmonies can be more frustrating if you are used to reading the piano roll to establish pitch visually. Renoise does have a tool to snap note entry to a scale of your choosing(with plenty of options for scale type) which smooths out the entry process tremendously, and if you're using a lot of block chords, they can be macro-ified as well to reduce the visual noise. The VST support is OK. They recently started supporting VST3. I occasionally encounter glitches with it - particularly one longstanding one where it renders stuck notes - but not enough to dissuade me. Worst case, I isolate the problem notes and bounce them to samples(which is easy).
  - atoav 5y ago
    Renoise even offers their sampler as a VST called Redux, so tour characterization might not be far off.
shams93 5y ago
It’s a lot of fun to use it’s a nice tool to use along with reaper
alphabet9000 5y ago
still legend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  Ha! Now I want to see Dax's 95 Raver's Megamix in Renoise :)
- nefitty 5y ago
  I had no idea there were alternatives to the FL Studio/Logic Pro-style DAW interface. Here’s a cool video I found of someone’s workflow using Renoise https://youtu.be/SQ5jTaXywuM https://youtu.be/SQ5jTaXywuM
  - aasasd 5y ago
    There's another popular-ish paradigm: basically software modular synths, rather low-level so you create individual sounds by wiring the signals into graphs. Max/MSP and ‘Pure Data’ are the most famous in this style, they're often called ‘sound programming languages’ for some reason. I'm having a hard time finding a finished demonstration instead of a tutorial, but here's one for Pure Data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGiT55likdo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGiT55likdo SunVox, mentioned elsewhere in the thread, is similar in the approach afaik, and works on many platforms (I first saw it on Palm and then Windows Mobile in mid-2000s). CSound is sorta related somehow, but it's an actual textual language for generating sound. There are also apps that look like hardware modular synths: VCV Rack is the most well-known and open-source; apparently Reaktor is in this vein too. And there's Hexen on Android. (Propellerhead Reason and Reaper both flirt with the modular approach, making you wire the signal between some modules, but they seem to have dialed it down, dropping unnecessary work for the user).
- mycall 5y ago
  Lots of breakcore artists use trackers.
mxmilkiib 5y ago
See also the open source Radium https://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium https://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp0wDH-OQlA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp0wDH-OQlA - Radium 3.6.6 playing the demo song * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhwmT0G5EwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhwmT0G5EwM Radium Tracker - Quick 2Bars Only Demo (Renoise "maYbe"- Style, Piano Roll inlcuded..) * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7-hJx7Lir4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7-hJx7Lir4 RADIUM - Tree of bugs song * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYGDUpr1uYs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYGDUpr1uYs Radium: Esau - Massaker (2015, 4 voice polyphony, 8-bit, 0-29kHz) https://www.youtube.com/user/KjetilMatheussen/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/KjetilMatheussen/videos
- dimatura 5y ago
  I'm intrigued by radium and I tried it once, didn't get too far. The feature set looks amazing, but doesn't seem exactly easy to use. I think this screen shot from the front page says it all. https://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/pictures/radium_6_0_99.png https://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/pictures/radium_6_0...
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    Is it really that much less unfriendly-looking than the original Soundtracker? http://kestra.exotica.org.uk/files/screenies/59000/Soundtracker23b.png http://kestra.exotica.org.uk/files/screenies/59000/Soundtrac... I am not a musician by any stretch of the imagination, but I fooled around with Soundtracker on my Amiga back in the late eighties, and most of that screenshot makes sense to me: upper left is a pattern being edited, with some graphical display of the waveforms added in along with some lines showing the envelope of volume/effects/etc (instead of having to type in hex numbers), upper right is some effects, and most of the bottom is a sequence of patterns, with extra tracks layered on top of that, which is a pretty neat addition to the traditional tracker way of working - make a sequence of patterns as usual, then add in other stuff in a horizontal format based on timeline-based DAWs.
    - dimatura 5y ago
dimatura 5y ago
One cool development in the past year or so are hardware trackers. Basically trackers for the DAW-less crowd. The polyend tracker [1] is really nice and a great value. And I'm super excited for the dirtywave m8 [2], kind of like a supercharged hardware LSDJ [3] (which is also a great project). Starts shipping in the next month or so, but you can already try it with publicly available firmware using just a teensy 4.1. Back in software, can't help but mention Sunvox [4]. Not exactly the same niche as Renoise (which aims to be closer to a traditional DAW), but it's an excellent modular tracker that runs pretty much anywhere, free (as in beer) on desktop and cheap on mobile. It doesn't have any support for VSTs but comes with a nice set of synth and FX modules that can be connected and bundled into "metamodules". [1] https://polyend.com/tracker/ https://polyend.com/tracker/ [2] https://dirtywave.com/ https://dirtywave.com/ [3] https://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/index.php https://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/index.php [4] https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  Yeah, Sunvox is great, and Alexander Zolotov (its developer) has also made a lot of other innovative and interesting audio apps.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  I'm a NerdSeq user: looking forward to the NerdSeq hardware tracker. The one I'm using is the Eurorack module. That said, I've been a Renoise owner for years now. It didn't end up clicking for me as far as composing music on it, but that's mostly because I'm not really DAW-minded. I should probably see if I can use it as a live mixer as I think it'd be more efficient than Logic Pro :)
  - dimatura 5y ago
    I'm not into modular, but I'm definitely looking out for the nerdseq portable!
  - atoav 5y ago
    I have a needseq as well, without having been a tracker user before and I still got the hang of it pretty quickly. As far as DAWs go I totally recommend looking at bitwig, because it has the modulation capabilities someone coming from the modular synth domain would like to have
rpmisms 5y ago
I used to make some very bad music in Renoise on an old Thinkpad X61T. I had a great workflow going with the stylus and keyboard, and could lay down bad beats very quickly. Highly recommend Renoise for playing around. It's cheap, lightweight, and absolutely joyful to use.
- scarecrowbob 5y ago
  I love making very bad music. I make it all the time, and find it quite joyful :D
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degenerate 5y ago
This software reminds me of AudioGL - what could have been groundbreaking audio generation software that was being developed in 2010 or so. https://youtu.be/bCC9uHHAEuA https://youtu.be/bCC9uHHAEuA I never found out if the developer had a sudden death or simply abandoned the project, but he completely disappeared one day and the project stayed in buggy pre-alpha for years. It wasn't vaporware - I had used it for a few hours and it was very cool stuff. Sadly I don't have the binaries anymore :(
pixelcort 5y ago
It seems DAW means digital audio workstation.
gkhartman 5y ago
Wikipedia page defining the term "tracker": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker
KapKap55 5y ago
I'll probably not get another chance to shill for an artist using Renoise, but shemusic uses it exclusively as far as I know and has done some pretty awesome stuff with it, see Coloris for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIxFjXE_D0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIxFjXE_D0o or Prismatic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNJzCaybzOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNJzCaybzOk
Slow_Hand 5y ago
I tried my hand at learning Renoise at the start of quarantine, after years of wanting to add tracker fluency to my skill set. I'm a regular user of Ableton, Logic, and Pro Tools and despite having a degree in computer music I've never been able to wrap my head around Renoise. Does anyone have stories of the "aha" moment for them, or recommendations on how best to teach yourself? If I recall, the official tutorials were somewhat lacking. I'd love to see an experienced user describe their workflow and approach. I already know a tremendous amount about DAW's and production technique. I'm looking for someone to give a wide overview and describe what it does well.
- mike_h 5y ago
  If the trickiness is from the tracker paradigm, the way I got into it was to take existing projects and study them one track (column) at a time. You can find a bunch at https://modarchive.org/ https://modarchive.org/. Not sure if Renoise is compatible with historical tracker files, but there are links at that site to apps that do.
- micklemeal 5y ago
  mike_h has some good advice, deconstructing other people's songs is a great way to learn Renoise. The forum was pretty friendly when I was active, and people post examples frequently, so that's a great resource. I also recommend learning the keyboard shortcuts like the back of your hand. It really helps with keeping in flow and is one of the biggest advantages of the tracker interface.
  - molotovbliss 5y ago
    Old mod creator here. (B00MER/kosmic aka kfmf) Most of the fun that disappeared with mp3s is such an ability to deconstruct another's work because of the similar appreciation for the same art. I would spend hours upon hours pouring over any of my favorite tracker artists like keith303, purple motion, lizard king & c.c.catch, etc. even ended up flunking out of high school because the demo scene art subculture was really alluring to my younger self, as it just made sense to me & was something I thoroughly enjoyed. To this day I can typically listen to any song and see the tracks, channels & notes in some regard. If you have no formal background in music but have an itch you can't scratch, explore trackers or even the more popular DAWs like Ableton. There's not much rules, so just have fun. "Even if I'm the last person out there doing it, it's a quiet pursuit. It's, a personal pursuit & it's something that helps me get up in the morning." -dj shadow
Slow_Hand 5y ago
Has anyone here used the Yamaha QY700 hardware sequencer? It's a hardware tracker interface: http://www.vintagesynth.com/yamaha/qy700.php http://www.vintagesynth.com/yamaha/qy700.php I'm a tremendous Squarepusher fan and I've always been intrigued by the fact that he's done all of his sequencing since roughly 2001 on one of these. He's not doing any of it "in the box", so to speak. The QY700 is the sequencing brain for a whole lot of hardware and his custom Reaktor patches. It's clearly a huge component of his workflow and I imagine part of what enables him to be so musically divergent from everyone else (among his other outstanding qualities). I'm such a fan (and also an experienced producer) that I've considered buying one and finally teaching myself to use a tracker with one of these. I have no doubt that he's pushing the limits of what a tracker can do. For those interested to see what Tom (Squarepusher) is about, here's a hop right into the deep-end for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmrsud1PpRk&list=RDwmrsud1PpRk&start_radio=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmrsud1PpRk&list=RDwmrsud1Pp...
- dimatura 5y ago
  Also a fan of squarepusher! I can't find many info on the QY700 sequencing workflow, but I doubt it's what usually known as a tracker. I see some screenshots that look like a horizontal piano roll-based view. Trackers don't use piano rolls but instead a vertical textual grid-based representation (so time goes from top to bottom instead of left to right).
  - t_akosuke 5y ago
    If it's like the older models in the series, it has a few different modes, one of which is the edit mode which is kind of like a tracker where you fine tune the notes and events that you first write in the step or the live sequencer
  - Slow_Hand 5y ago
    Hmmm yeah. It seems I've been looking at the QY700's pattern mode and was under the impression it was a tracker. It certainly resembles one and the results in Tom's music certainly sound like one. I know from experience that it would be absolute hell to program that stuff in a piano-roll, so it seems unlikely that he's relying solely on that. Hmmm...
scarygliders 5y ago
Brings back memories of the time I spent - hours, days, week-on-week - with my Amiga and OctaMED [0]. I may get this - I have tried and tried to get into the usual DAW workflow but each time I gave up - could not get used to them as the Tracker workflow is so ingrained into my mind. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OctaMED https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OctaMED
- ryan-allen 5y ago
  Hoo boy do I have a video for you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV1McEtejxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV1McEtejxo
  - scarygliders 5y ago
    Just watched it - loved it! I managed to rescue 3 of my old mods from an Amiga floppy a decade or so ago. My Amiga 1200 still works but its internal floppy drive, which was an upgraded PC high-density format drive with its custom controller card, no longer works and from time to time I still look on the interwebs to see if I can source a replacement. Oh well, one of these days ;) Thanks for the video link - enjoyed it a lot :)
fb03 5y ago
Been using Renoise for about 9 years now, and I absolutely love it! Post your renoise-made music here! this is me: https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/ibu-kid https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/ibu-kid
- molotovbliss 5y ago
  Shameless plug, https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/Z9zMJ https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/Z9zMJ
smolder 5y ago
I am a long time paid user of renoise. It was the perfect (affordable, surprisingly high quality and full featured) step up for me from earlier trackers like fasttracker, MODPlug, Psycle.
Minor49er 5y ago
IDM artist Venetian Snares uses Renoise. Here's a demo track he uploaded back in 2006: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U He also uses it to control a gigantic modular synth setup
- chungus 5y ago
  I came here to post this. Have it on copy. It's the first thing that came to mind when I saw "tracker" and to be honest I didn't even know it was done in renoise. I know a lot of chiptune music on gameboys is made with tracker software as well. This venetian snares video really is something else isn't it.
TheRealPomax 5y ago
Odd thing to see here on HN, it's been around for almost as long as FL Studio has (that is to say, two decades now). Still: yes, trackers survived into the modern day, and some are still getting updated to make sure that stays that way =)
smoldesu 5y ago
My favorite choice in this space is Bitwig Studio. It has a workflow that's more similar to Live, but with fun modular features that will make power-users drool. Bitwig's modulation system is first-class, too.
deltron3030 5y ago
Cheap old Thinkpad, Linux + Renoise works well, especially if you add one of those old RME PCMIA interfaces. If you set it up so that it boots into Renoise It's basically like a standalone instrument, like a MPC or Octatrack.
IgorPartola 5y ago
I am ignorant on this topic so please excuse the dumb question. Is this like Garage Band but OSS?
- sprkwd 5y ago
  It’s like GarageBand in that you can make music with it, but it’s not that it’s OSS, it has a different paradigm to the ‘sideways’ DAWs like GB but you program in vertical strips with samples to make your music. Popular with some Warp record artists.
- aasasd 5y ago
  To add to the neighbor comment: trackers were around since the late 80s or early 90s, popular on computers like Amiga, and the interface was suited for low-res or even text-mode graphics. E.g. there's a tracker for Gameboy, called ‘LSDJ’; and a similarly restricted alternative for Android is Nanoloop: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nanoloop https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nanoloop (at least afaik it's a tracker).
aasasd 5y ago
Hitori Tori is a rather proficient user of Renoise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJY5u6cC7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJY5u6cC7A Frankly I barely have any idea what's going on in the video, as I've never got into trackers. Just, dude often needs three or so instances of Renoise at once, and handles them with a hardware controller.
commotionfever 5y ago
I recently got back into using Renoise on Linux and it's thanks to PipeWire - which lets you run JACK/Pulse/whatever programs at the same time with no hastle. It's super nice
zubspace 5y ago
I always wanted to get into trackers but never got around actually trying. Just watched my favourite video about someone using a hw tracker [1]. This is so great and truly captures the experimental nature of using them! [1] https://youtu.be/9TquD64S8v0?t=155 https://youtu.be/9TquD64S8v0?t=155
maydup-nem 5y ago
I wish this was open-sourced. I wanted to do custom modal keybindings, because I find the current approach not to my taste. I like the idea of trackers and I will probably be using Renoise from time to time, but if it were open sourced, it would have been a great deal more useful to me. I mean, I asked for the feature on the official forum, but nobody answered. Would've coded it myself. Why keep it closed? Just why?
knoke 5y ago
I’d suggest to view this super interesting presentation dir open source music https://youtu.be/dRM7wkMBSHY https://youtu.be/dRM7wkMBSHY Trackers might seem nostalgic, or as a quirky alternative. But they are also a forgotten was of dealing with musical pieces as a whole: everything a Musical piece is including notation, sound, performance and editability of all the parts and their whole.
- mycall 5y ago
  Thank you, that was quite interesting.

254 points by 1_player 5y ago

adamnemecek 5y ago

I'm working on an IDE for music composition. I'm releasing soon http://ngrid.io http://ngrid.io

bigdict 5y ago
please stop
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
29athrowaway 5y ago
Any previews?

gkhartman 5y ago

I'm always happy to see linux compatibility in DAW software. $75 seems like a reasonable price for a license. I'd love to hear HN community feedback on how this stacks up against Reaper (my current DAW) that's priced at $60 for personal use.

jolux 5y ago
Trackers are very, very different from the clip-manipulation style of Reaper/Logic/Pro Tools. They are typically seen as being best for electronic music, though this is partly historical. You would be learning a whole new workflow for a DAW.
- TheRealPomax 5y ago
  *clip-manipulation and MIDI arrangement.
colordrops 5y ago
Bitwig is a competitor to Ableton made by ex-devs that runs on Linux, and better in some ways
- fullstop 5y ago
  I gave my daughter a Nektar midi keyboard for her birthday, and it came with a license for Bitwig Studio. I saw that it was available on Linux and thought that this was fantastic. I'm sure that she'll get there eventually, but she's doing everything in Garage Band on an iPad at the moment. She's 13, so she's still learning the ropes here.
- whiddershins 5y ago
  Has it ever become stable?
  - colordrops 5y ago
    Is it unstable for you? I've used it for a while without problems.
    - whiddershins 5y ago
      Haven't tried it in years.
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  I think the newer version even opens Live projects with varying results. You'll obviously have to swap out any stuff that came with Live since even the samples only open with the right license.
antiterra 5y ago
The main reason to use Renoise is if the tracker style sequencing is a productive process for you. I believe there’s a minimal version called Redux, but that changes the workflow. There is a free alternative. It isn’t native Linux and not as slick, but OpenMPT is meant to run in Wine and functions as a competent modern tracker.
pmoriarty 5y ago
I haven't used Reaper, but from what I can tell it's a traditional DAW with a piano-roll interface (with the closest free/open-source alternative probably being Ardour). Renoise, on the other hand, is a DAW with a tracker interface. It's a very different workflow. I paid $75 for Renoise about 6 years ago and it's been great using it on Linux via Jack. It works flawlessly and is highly polished.. it's as good as any other commercial audio application that I've used, but it's very different from anything that's not a tracker. I use it in conjunction with a lot of VST plugins that I run through Wine and some native Linux plugins from u-he, which also work great. My impression is that most people use Renoise for making electronic music (which is how I use it too), for which it's very well suited. In my own experience, however, using the usual tracker workflow is not that great for manual exploration, however Renoise has lots of free third-party Lua scripts that can help with that, and it's also great for manipulating and sequencing samples. Here's a video on doing some advanced reverb processing with it: [1] Lots of ways to use it. The other thing I've heard that at least in older versions of Renoise (not sure how it is in the newest versions) it wasn't great for recording really long samples. So if you want to do something like record a live band's jam session or something you'll probably want to use something else. Renoise is best for working with shorter samples (or with synths or other VSTs or generating its own music). [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZnfyJqvM6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZnfyJqvM6s
- chaboud 5y ago
  REAPER is basically a Vegas Pro clone. As one of the early Vegas devs and a Mac user, REAPER feels like home to me. It’s solid, and it’s my go-to for time-focused audio editing when I need to move quickly. However, as an old Scream Tracker user, seeing the sequence composition model alive today is a real treat. An entire lineage of loop timeline products owes its heritage to sequencers driving samplers, and it’s a really useful way to think about the macro structure of music. Somewhere in my garage there’s a pile of floppies full of mods waiting to be listened to.
  - GoofballJones 5y ago
    REAPER to me has been wonderful. Very light-weight and can do anything that the big ones do. It just doesn't come with a ton of it's own instruments and sounds like Ableton or Logic or others might. But if you have a ton of VSTs (like I do), it doesn't matter.
bane 5y ago
It's a very good DAW if you like using tracker interfaces. It supports sample-based tracking (the old Amiga style) and VSTis. It supports the usual sample effects, has it's own effects and can pretty comfortably use VST effects as well. I haven't dug super deep into it, but it has a lot of automation options, and some clever ideas, but it's a very complex tool. I'm not entirely sure it's worth all that over a piano roll style DAW, but it's probably the current pinnacle of tracker-style tech. It's very reasonably priced for what it is IMHO.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "it's a very complex tool" It's definitely not simple, but I wouldn't say it's any more complex than, say, Ableton. It's just a different workflow that more traditional DAW users aren't used to, so they'll have to learn. Fortunately there are a million great tutorials on it on youtube.
megameter 5y ago
Most trackers, Renoise among them, could be characterized as a standalone sequencer instrument with some DAW features. Renoise specifically is sampling-first. It has the gamut of typical sampler features and built-in effects, plus you have multiple ways to sequence everything(besides high-level pattern reuse across the song, you can abstract a lot of stuff into key-triggered sub-sequences or macro knobs). It has built-in effects, you can record automation curves and if you have something very specific in mind, there is Lua-based scripting and a little community of third-party scripts. In general, step sequencing is faster here than in any piano-roll based system, with the knock-on effect of it being extremely easy to build complex percussive sequences with a lot of timbral variation. Melodic lines and harmonies can be more frustrating if you are used to reading the piano roll to establish pitch visually. Renoise does have a tool to snap note entry to a scale of your choosing(with plenty of options for scale type) which smooths out the entry process tremendously, and if you're using a lot of block chords, they can be macro-ified as well to reduce the visual noise. The VST support is OK. They recently started supporting VST3. I occasionally encounter glitches with it - particularly one longstanding one where it renders stuck notes - but not enough to dissuade me. Worst case, I isolate the problem notes and bounce them to samples(which is easy).
- atoav 5y ago
  Renoise even offers their sampler as a VST called Redux, so tour characterization might not be far off.

shams93 5y ago

It’s a lot of fun to use it’s a nice tool to use along with reaper

alphabet9000 5y ago

still legend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U

alfiedotwtf 5y ago
Ha! Now I want to see Dax's 95 Raver's Megamix in Renoise :)
nefitty 5y ago
I had no idea there were alternatives to the FL Studio/Logic Pro-style DAW interface. Here’s a cool video I found of someone’s workflow using Renoise https://youtu.be/SQ5jTaXywuM https://youtu.be/SQ5jTaXywuM
- aasasd 5y ago
  There's another popular-ish paradigm: basically software modular synths, rather low-level so you create individual sounds by wiring the signals into graphs. Max/MSP and ‘Pure Data’ are the most famous in this style, they're often called ‘sound programming languages’ for some reason. I'm having a hard time finding a finished demonstration instead of a tutorial, but here's one for Pure Data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGiT55likdo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGiT55likdo SunVox, mentioned elsewhere in the thread, is similar in the approach afaik, and works on many platforms (I first saw it on Palm and then Windows Mobile in mid-2000s). CSound is sorta related somehow, but it's an actual textual language for generating sound. There are also apps that look like hardware modular synths: VCV Rack is the most well-known and open-source; apparently Reaktor is in this vein too. And there's Hexen on Android. (Propellerhead Reason and Reaper both flirt with the modular approach, making you wire the signal between some modules, but they seem to have dialed it down, dropping unnecessary work for the user).
mycall 5y ago
Lots of breakcore artists use trackers.

mxmilkiib 5y ago

See also the open source Radium https://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium https://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp0wDH-OQlA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp0wDH-OQlA - Radium 3.6.6 playing the demo song * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhwmT0G5EwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhwmT0G5EwM Radium Tracker - Quick 2Bars Only Demo (Renoise "maYbe"- Style, Piano Roll inlcuded..) * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7-hJx7Lir4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7-hJx7Lir4 RADIUM - Tree of bugs song * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYGDUpr1uYs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYGDUpr1uYs Radium: Esau - Massaker (2015, 4 voice polyphony, 8-bit, 0-29kHz) https://www.youtube.com/user/KjetilMatheussen/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/KjetilMatheussen/videos

dimatura 5y ago
I'm intrigued by radium and I tried it once, didn't get too far. The feature set looks amazing, but doesn't seem exactly easy to use. I think this screen shot from the front page says it all. https://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/pictures/radium_6_0_99.png https://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/pictures/radium_6_0...
- egypturnash 5y ago
  Is it really that much less unfriendly-looking than the original Soundtracker? http://kestra.exotica.org.uk/files/screenies/59000/Soundtracker23b.png http://kestra.exotica.org.uk/files/screenies/59000/Soundtrac... I am not a musician by any stretch of the imagination, but I fooled around with Soundtracker on my Amiga back in the late eighties, and most of that screenshot makes sense to me: upper left is a pattern being edited, with some graphical display of the waveforms added in along with some lines showing the envelope of volume/effects/etc (instead of having to type in hex numbers), upper right is some effects, and most of the bottom is a sequence of patterns, with extra tracks layered on top of that, which is a pretty neat addition to the traditional tracker way of working - make a sequence of patterns as usual, then add in other stuff in a horizontal format based on timeline-based DAWs.
  - dimatura 5y ago

dimatura 5y ago

One cool development in the past year or so are hardware trackers. Basically trackers for the DAW-less crowd. The polyend tracker [1] is really nice and a great value. And I'm super excited for the dirtywave m8 [2], kind of like a supercharged hardware LSDJ [3] (which is also a great project). Starts shipping in the next month or so, but you can already try it with publicly available firmware using just a teensy 4.1. Back in software, can't help but mention Sunvox [4]. Not exactly the same niche as Renoise (which aims to be closer to a traditional DAW), but it's an excellent modular tracker that runs pretty much anywhere, free (as in beer) on desktop and cheap on mobile. It doesn't have any support for VSTs but comes with a nice set of synth and FX modules that can be connected and bundled into "metamodules". [1] https://polyend.com/tracker/ https://polyend.com/tracker/ [2] https://dirtywave.com/ https://dirtywave.com/ [3] https://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/index.php https://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/index.php [4] https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

pmoriarty 5y ago
Yeah, Sunvox is great, and Alexander Zolotov (its developer) has also made a lot of other innovative and interesting audio apps.
Applejinx 5y ago
I'm a NerdSeq user: looking forward to the NerdSeq hardware tracker. The one I'm using is the Eurorack module. That said, I've been a Renoise owner for years now. It didn't end up clicking for me as far as composing music on it, but that's mostly because I'm not really DAW-minded. I should probably see if I can use it as a live mixer as I think it'd be more efficient than Logic Pro :)
- dimatura 5y ago
  I'm not into modular, but I'm definitely looking out for the nerdseq portable!
- atoav 5y ago
  I have a needseq as well, without having been a tracker user before and I still got the hang of it pretty quickly. As far as DAWs go I totally recommend looking at bitwig, because it has the modulation capabilities someone coming from the modular synth domain would like to have

rpmisms 5y ago

I used to make some very bad music in Renoise on an old Thinkpad X61T. I had a great workflow going with the stylus and keyboard, and could lay down bad beats very quickly. Highly recommend Renoise for playing around. It's cheap, lightweight, and absolutely joyful to use.

scarecrowbob 5y ago
I love making very bad music. I make it all the time, and find it quite joyful :D

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degenerate 5y ago

This software reminds me of AudioGL - what could have been groundbreaking audio generation software that was being developed in 2010 or so. https://youtu.be/bCC9uHHAEuA https://youtu.be/bCC9uHHAEuA I never found out if the developer had a sudden death or simply abandoned the project, but he completely disappeared one day and the project stayed in buggy pre-alpha for years. It wasn't vaporware - I had used it for a few hours and it was very cool stuff. Sadly I don't have the binaries anymore :(

pixelcort 5y ago

It seems DAW means digital audio workstation.

gkhartman 5y ago

Wikipedia page defining the term "tracker": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

KapKap55 5y ago

I'll probably not get another chance to shill for an artist using Renoise, but shemusic uses it exclusively as far as I know and has done some pretty awesome stuff with it, see Coloris for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIxFjXE_D0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIxFjXE_D0o or Prismatic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNJzCaybzOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNJzCaybzOk

Slow_Hand 5y ago

I tried my hand at learning Renoise at the start of quarantine, after years of wanting to add tracker fluency to my skill set. I'm a regular user of Ableton, Logic, and Pro Tools and despite having a degree in computer music I've never been able to wrap my head around Renoise. Does anyone have stories of the "aha" moment for them, or recommendations on how best to teach yourself? If I recall, the official tutorials were somewhat lacking. I'd love to see an experienced user describe their workflow and approach. I already know a tremendous amount about DAW's and production technique. I'm looking for someone to give a wide overview and describe what it does well.

mike_h 5y ago
If the trickiness is from the tracker paradigm, the way I got into it was to take existing projects and study them one track (column) at a time. You can find a bunch at https://modarchive.org/ https://modarchive.org/. Not sure if Renoise is compatible with historical tracker files, but there are links at that site to apps that do.
micklemeal 5y ago
mike_h has some good advice, deconstructing other people's songs is a great way to learn Renoise. The forum was pretty friendly when I was active, and people post examples frequently, so that's a great resource. I also recommend learning the keyboard shortcuts like the back of your hand. It really helps with keeping in flow and is one of the biggest advantages of the tracker interface.
- molotovbliss 5y ago
  Old mod creator here. (B00MER/kosmic aka kfmf) Most of the fun that disappeared with mp3s is such an ability to deconstruct another's work because of the similar appreciation for the same art. I would spend hours upon hours pouring over any of my favorite tracker artists like keith303, purple motion, lizard king & c.c.catch, etc. even ended up flunking out of high school because the demo scene art subculture was really alluring to my younger self, as it just made sense to me & was something I thoroughly enjoyed. To this day I can typically listen to any song and see the tracks, channels & notes in some regard. If you have no formal background in music but have an itch you can't scratch, explore trackers or even the more popular DAWs like Ableton. There's not much rules, so just have fun. "Even if I'm the last person out there doing it, it's a quiet pursuit. It's, a personal pursuit & it's something that helps me get up in the morning." -dj shadow

Slow_Hand 5y ago

Has anyone here used the Yamaha QY700 hardware sequencer? It's a hardware tracker interface: http://www.vintagesynth.com/yamaha/qy700.php http://www.vintagesynth.com/yamaha/qy700.php I'm a tremendous Squarepusher fan and I've always been intrigued by the fact that he's done all of his sequencing since roughly 2001 on one of these. He's not doing any of it "in the box", so to speak. The QY700 is the sequencing brain for a whole lot of hardware and his custom Reaktor patches. It's clearly a huge component of his workflow and I imagine part of what enables him to be so musically divergent from everyone else (among his other outstanding qualities). I'm such a fan (and also an experienced producer) that I've considered buying one and finally teaching myself to use a tracker with one of these. I have no doubt that he's pushing the limits of what a tracker can do. For those interested to see what Tom (Squarepusher) is about, here's a hop right into the deep-end for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmrsud1PpRk&list=RDwmrsud1PpRk&start_radio=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmrsud1PpRk&list=RDwmrsud1Pp...

dimatura 5y ago
Also a fan of squarepusher! I can't find many info on the QY700 sequencing workflow, but I doubt it's what usually known as a tracker. I see some screenshots that look like a horizontal piano roll-based view. Trackers don't use piano rolls but instead a vertical textual grid-based representation (so time goes from top to bottom instead of left to right).
- t_akosuke 5y ago
  If it's like the older models in the series, it has a few different modes, one of which is the edit mode which is kind of like a tracker where you fine tune the notes and events that you first write in the step or the live sequencer
- Slow_Hand 5y ago
  Hmmm yeah. It seems I've been looking at the QY700's pattern mode and was under the impression it was a tracker. It certainly resembles one and the results in Tom's music certainly sound like one. I know from experience that it would be absolute hell to program that stuff in a piano-roll, so it seems unlikely that he's relying solely on that. Hmmm...

scarygliders 5y ago

Brings back memories of the time I spent - hours, days, week-on-week - with my Amiga and OctaMED [0]. I may get this - I have tried and tried to get into the usual DAW workflow but each time I gave up - could not get used to them as the Tracker workflow is so ingrained into my mind. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OctaMED https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OctaMED

ryan-allen 5y ago
Hoo boy do I have a video for you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV1McEtejxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV1McEtejxo
- scarygliders 5y ago
  Just watched it - loved it! I managed to rescue 3 of my old mods from an Amiga floppy a decade or so ago. My Amiga 1200 still works but its internal floppy drive, which was an upgraded PC high-density format drive with its custom controller card, no longer works and from time to time I still look on the interwebs to see if I can source a replacement. Oh well, one of these days ;) Thanks for the video link - enjoyed it a lot :)

fb03 5y ago

Been using Renoise for about 9 years now, and I absolutely love it! Post your renoise-made music here! this is me: https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/ibu-kid https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/ibu-kid

molotovbliss 5y ago
Shameless plug, https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/Z9zMJ https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/Z9zMJ

smolder 5y ago

I am a long time paid user of renoise. It was the perfect (affordable, surprisingly high quality and full featured) step up for me from earlier trackers like fasttracker, MODPlug, Psycle.

Minor49er 5y ago

IDM artist Venetian Snares uses Renoise. Here's a demo track he uploaded back in 2006: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U He also uses it to control a gigantic modular synth setup

chungus 5y ago
I came here to post this. Have it on copy. It's the first thing that came to mind when I saw "tracker" and to be honest I didn't even know it was done in renoise. I know a lot of chiptune music on gameboys is made with tracker software as well. This venetian snares video really is something else isn't it.

TheRealPomax 5y ago

Odd thing to see here on HN, it's been around for almost as long as FL Studio has (that is to say, two decades now). Still: yes, trackers survived into the modern day, and some are still getting updated to make sure that stays that way =)

smoldesu 5y ago

My favorite choice in this space is Bitwig Studio. It has a workflow that's more similar to Live, but with fun modular features that will make power-users drool. Bitwig's modulation system is first-class, too.

deltron3030 5y ago

Cheap old Thinkpad, Linux + Renoise works well, especially if you add one of those old RME PCMIA interfaces. If you set it up so that it boots into Renoise It's basically like a standalone instrument, like a MPC or Octatrack.

IgorPartola 5y ago

I am ignorant on this topic so please excuse the dumb question. Is this like Garage Band but OSS?

sprkwd 5y ago
It’s like GarageBand in that you can make music with it, but it’s not that it’s OSS, it has a different paradigm to the ‘sideways’ DAWs like GB but you program in vertical strips with samples to make your music. Popular with some Warp record artists.
aasasd 5y ago
To add to the neighbor comment: trackers were around since the late 80s or early 90s, popular on computers like Amiga, and the interface was suited for low-res or even text-mode graphics. E.g. there's a tracker for Gameboy, called ‘LSDJ’; and a similarly restricted alternative for Android is Nanoloop: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nanoloop https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nanoloop (at least afaik it's a tracker).

aasasd 5y ago

Hitori Tori is a rather proficient user of Renoise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJY5u6cC7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJY5u6cC7A Frankly I barely have any idea what's going on in the video, as I've never got into trackers. Just, dude often needs three or so instances of Renoise at once, and handles them with a hardware controller.

commotionfever 5y ago

I recently got back into using Renoise on Linux and it's thanks to PipeWire - which lets you run JACK/Pulse/whatever programs at the same time with no hastle. It's super nice

zubspace 5y ago

I always wanted to get into trackers but never got around actually trying. Just watched my favourite video about someone using a hw tracker [1]. This is so great and truly captures the experimental nature of using them! [1] https://youtu.be/9TquD64S8v0?t=155 https://youtu.be/9TquD64S8v0?t=155

maydup-nem 5y ago

I wish this was open-sourced. I wanted to do custom modal keybindings, because I find the current approach not to my taste. I like the idea of trackers and I will probably be using Renoise from time to time, but if it were open sourced, it would have been a great deal more useful to me. I mean, I asked for the feature on the official forum, but nobody answered. Would've coded it myself. Why keep it closed? Just why?

knoke 5y ago

I’d suggest to view this super interesting presentation dir open source music https://youtu.be/dRM7wkMBSHY https://youtu.be/dRM7wkMBSHY Trackers might seem nostalgic, or as a quirky alternative. But they are also a forgotten was of dealing with musical pieces as a whole: everything a Musical piece is including notation, sound, performance and editability of all the parts and their whole.

mycall 5y ago
Thank you, that was quite interesting.