A challenge to efficiency brings some terrific results. We’ve got tracks for you to hear, a few quick tips on production with Renoise, a place to go talk about the tracks and how to optimize them for netbooks, and a new extended deadline. And if you’re curious what kinds of music can be made with trackers, now’s a perfect chance to give folks from this community a listen. You may be surprised by the breadth of what you hear.

The forward march of transistors has led to maximalist ideas in music technology. The only problem: musical composition often benefits from efficiency. I remember in the early days of Cakewalk for DOS wondering what I would do with their thousands of promised tracks – and that was before digital audio, soft synths, 64-bit, and the like.

The Creative Commons-licensed Indamixx + Renoise + CDM music competition we introduced last month returns to that idea of efficiency. You use a tool with a different creative approach (Renoise, a modern tracker), then work to conserve computer resources instead of squander them. The music can then successfully run on – and you can win – a lovely, ultra-compact Indamixx Netbook.

And while you’re doing more with less, we’ve decided to give you a little more … time. We didn’t want to exclude anyone from getting in entries, so the deadline has been extended – meaning if you submitted already, you have a chance to revise and polish or respond to feedback (including, importantly, CPU optimization feedback).

New deadline: SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25

New full-blown entry + discussion site (with audio, full XRNS files, and plenty of chatter on improving production quality and optimization):
http://www.renoise.com/competitions/indamixx/

Need help with testing? Once you’ve got an entry in, Ronald Stewart of Indamixx has offered a free download of their Transmission OS (based on Linux), which you can run on your laptop for testing purposes. Contact him via the inquiry form, and be sure to mention you’re entering the contest!

And folks, so far, some brilliant work. The contest organizers (myself, plus the folks from 64 Studio, Indamixx, and Renoise) have been going through entries and are blown away.

Tips

We got some tips from users contributing I wanted to share:

Cmd+C, V, and P will help you a lot!

-subtacted aka Steven Nguyen

Generating Drum Kits in the instrument mode is definitely something some one should look into if they’re slicing beats like an old school tracker (fast-tracker II? It’s before my time, that’s for sure). It’s definitely helped me plug in breaks super fast.

And learn your effect columns! They can help you achieve some of the coolest sounds that I find are really hard to emulate outside of Renoise.

-Dave Smith-Hayes

I’ve used the effects columns to balance out the bass, midrange, and treble parts of the sound, it helps to give me a balanced sound in a quick-and-dirty fashion.

Vocoder is Vocov2, vocals recorded using Ardour.

-chunter

This contest has been a great learning experience. I wrote a quick summation on John’s site that approximates my account.

what else….hmmm… I guess that, as usual, the mp3 is not as great as the .wav or listening in Renoise. I recommend listening in Renoise.

Renoise is time and again the program that I really go to get my work done. I don’t feel like there are a lot of hip hop makers out here that use Renoise but it really has helped me do good work. If you don’t use Renoise yet, download the demo, open the tutorials and demos and restart your creativity!

-84 Caprice

This track for the competition I used Renoise as a Live improvisation tool with traditional and non traditional instruments. After many layers of improvised live piano, synthesis, and machines, Renoise allowed me to cut up what I wanted and used.

-Silent Strangers

Don’t rely too heavily on vsts, remember tracking all started by sampling. Also, if you enjoy vst instruments a lot but want to optimize for lower cpu usage, don’t forget that you can render your channels and turn that instrument sound into a sample – great for live play efficiency and great for techy edits. ;p

-K-Rai

Tips? Hmm… Just do your own thing and don’t give a f*k about what others are doing.. If it sounds right, do it. And always use the flux capacitor mixdown technique.

-Custard

See, every time I mix that way, I wind up back in 1985.

Also, don’t forget to make use of file optimization with this free, omni-platform utility:
XRNIRipper – Renoise XRNS/XRNI inspector, ripper and OGG compressor for Java

Blog Journals and Process

A couple of people were inspired enough to blog about their efforts:

These days I typically use a piano to work out ideas and then graduate into software to execute them. Renoise tends to be my favorite place to land as it loads up like butter and is quick for nailing down concepts. The implied constraints of this contest, however, had hoisted a series of difficulties in my process. The first being that while I like to use VST/VSTi’s in the process, non-native sound creators or effectors were not to be used in the final version. The second concern was the size of the Renoise file as the winning entry will be used as one of the demos within the program (I haven’t had to deal with file size since I turned my 1.44meg floppies into coasters). Third concern – CPU usage. I was shooting for a great track weighing in under 5 megs. My rough track was loaded with complex VST/VSTi’s and was well over 20 megs.

The process was actually more focusing than I imagined.

84 Caprice Featuring Prof – Karma the Uh Oh Beat [AudioCookbook]

Me being who I am had to enter. Not that I’m in it to win the computer, nor a Renoise license because I’m perfectly happy with my Mac and I already own a Renoise license. So why then? because it’s fun, and I should really start using Renoise now that I bought it.

The result is “Cow in a can”

Cow in a can, my entry in the Renoise-compo. [Johan Larsby]

The Music

In no particular order, I wanted to compile some of the latest tracks I’ve got. Of course, you should absolutely go vote and discuss these tracks on the official competition site.

Renegade Jazz by Custard

Void Pointer – Rampensau (192) by Void Pointer

AcrossWorlds by fengland

Compact Electronic Desktop Music by chunter

Tangeble by dvoraktunes (on drop.io)

Persecution Theory by phila (on drop.io)

UNGHpsycho2009-140bpm by megadrives

Space Shuffle by ASCII Death Star (on drop.io)

I think this track is Renoise-based, if separate from the competition.
The Love Affair of Man and Machine (Synthesizer Quartet and Solo Piano) by SilentStrangers

Oh yeah, and I do love the title of this track:

You Know CDM by subtracted

The tracker is back. Piano rolls and fake multitrack tape turn out not to be the only way to conceptualize how music is put together in digital form. And Renoise is a terrific way to learn a ground-up approach to production, because you get the quick workflow of the tracker without having to sacrifice so many of the “comforts of home” we’re used to in modern DAWs. So we’re pleased to have our Renoise + Indamixx contest going, not only for existing users, but newcomers, too.

Renoise users have one way of evangelizing why they love their tool, which is to show off, as seen in the excellent video above. But what if you’re new to Renoise, or new to trackers in general, and want to experiment? You don’t even need to make a cash investment: you can start to experiment with a relatively full-featured demo version on Mac, Windows, and Linux. The time investment is the likely barrier. So I asked Montreal-based Dac Chartrand of Renoise, who is also the man who keeps tabs on the community, to share his tips. Here’s what he suggests:

1) XRNS files are source code. Find one you like, load it up, press the spacebar and start clicking around. Renoise will happily chug along as you explore each and every facet of the sequencer. When you get bored of clicking, try remixing. Move some notes around, press the escape key and jam on the QWERTY keyboard. Anyone familiar with trackers will tell you that this is how it’s always been done, this is how it always should be, file sharing since the days of Amiga. PRO TIP: Tutorials and Demo Songs are in the Help menu.

2) YouTube is your friend. Go there, type Renoise, watch and learn. Enthusiastic users show off their tunes, some even make "Do It Yourself" tutorials for good measure.

3) Download the "Pattern Command Quick Reference Card" PDF file. This DIY reference was created by a user in the Renoise forums. It’s a cool print out that folds up and sits pretty  on your desk. Pattern Commands are special columns to the right of notes; lets you take sample manipulation to the next level.

PDF: http://paulmerchant.com/downloads/RenoiseReferenceCard2.pdf

4) If you don’t know trackers, then forget everything you learned about other DAW workflows. You must unlearn what you know in order to be a jedi master. For example, other sequencers  have a very strong relation between track and instrument. In Renoise, instruments go anywhere,  tracks are what you make of them. Other sequencers have a timeline, Renoise has patterns that you chain together to make a song. A newbie mistake is to try to make one gigantic pattern.  Instead, make several smaller patterns and sequence them.

5) Documentation. Yup, it’s thee copout tip. But seriously, there are tons of documentation on the Renoise website. Not reading them is kind of stupid.  When all else fails, browse the forums or see if anyone in IRC chat can help.

DOCS: http://tutorials.renoise.com/
FORUMS: http://www.renoise.com/board/
IRC: http://www.renoise.com/community/chat/

Thanks, Dac! Now, I’ll also be working on some stuff for CDM soon, as well, but this should get you going in the meantime.

Must-Have Renoise Utility

Bantai at Renoise also shares (via comments) an excellent tool for sharing your work in Renoise, compressing files, and – aprospos of Dac’s suggestion – inspecting existing XRNS files.

Another tip: you can get the filesize of your song down by up to a factor 10 if you use lossy compressed samples instead of the default 32-bit stereo FLAC file format. I reckon a small filesize wins you bonus points in a tweaker’s compo.

Since Renoise songs are basically ZIP files containing song data and samples, it’s almost trivial to run the extracted contents of the song through OggDrop or a similar application and zip it up again.

It can be easier: I have written a Java tool that takes the work out of your hands and compresses your Renoise XRNS song automatically:

XRNIRipper

(Java geeks, he also writes me: “I’m using vorbis-java lib from xiph.org and a modified version of jFLAC to support Renoise’s custom 32-bit FLACs. There are also several libs included to convert sample and bit rates. Curiously enough, I couldn’t find any other Java apps that encode files to Ogg Vorbis.”)

More Videos, Tips?

It’s a couple of years old and based on an earlier version, but I especially liked this tutorial for demonstrating what the workflow is about:

And if you Renoise-using readers have tips, or if you find a YouTube video you think is especially awesome, please do share. I’ll get back to working on my basic guide.

Renoise has already earned a passionate following among lovers of trackers. The once-forgotten alternative to conventional sequencers, these music editors were beloved for their quick workflow and vertical, atomic approach to assembling beats and patterns. But Renoise is increasingly poised to appeal to other kinds of music makers, too, not just tracker purists.

2.1 you can sum up pretty easily: now you can integrate Renoise with other stuff easily. There’s ReWire support (appropriately enough for a tool beginning with “Re” in the title). And if you’re on Linux, you can pipe control and audio through the ultra-elegant, ultra-powerful JACK. (If you’re not on Linux, you may have just gotten a good reason to give it a try.)

http://www.renoise.com/

This is on top of a rapidly-growing set of features like multi-core balancing, automatic delay compensation, audio recording (cough, Reason), and MIDI inputs and outputs. In other words, this is a tracker you can use without giving up modern luxuries. Maybe it’s like the difference between having a tent in gorgeous mountainous wilderness, and having a mansion with a hot tub and a T1 Internet line.

ReWire is the headline, but some of the live performance tools may make an even bigger difference. Live control tools and live pattern sequencing could make Renoise a lot more useful in performance, even without just ReWiring into Live and recording clips. The pattern triggering looks especially nice, because it brings a feature Game Boy trackers have often used live. (Add JACK on Linux, and you could add your own custom instruments.)

And, oh yeah, the whole program runs on every OS, has an incredibly responsive and involved community that impacts the direction of the tool, and is distributed on a shareware model rather than with painful copy protection.

Full disclosure: I’m slightly biased by enjoying a couple of beers with Renoise’s Dac, and by the fact that I think this looks completely delicious.

Here’s the full changelog.

Full ReWire Slave & Master support (on Windows & OSX)

ReWire allows you to connect and synchronize multiple software applications, so that you can run them side by side while passing Audio/MIDI information between them.

For example, you could connect Renoise to Logic, program your drums in Renoise, while arranging the bulk of your song in Logic. Or you could connect both Reason and Ableton Live to Renoise, arrange your track in Renoise, control Reason’s built-in synthesizers, and play around with loops in Live. All it takes is some ReWire enabled software and you are good to go.

ReWire has two modes, both of which are fully supported by Renoise: *ReWire Master* (ReWire Mixer) and *ReWire Slave* (ReWire Synth)

Jack Transport Support (Linux only)

Similar to ReWire, Renoise now supports the Jack transport protocol. Jack transport allows Linux users to start, stop and reposition multiple audio programs, all connected/running through Jack. 

New Pattern Sequencer Features:

Decoupled Sequencer Playback Now Possible: This new feature allows the user to detach the current playback position from the edit position. This lets you edit a pattern while other patterns are playing.

Live Pattern Triggering:

Patterns can now be "scheduled" for playback via a new column in the Pattern Sequencer. Without stopping playback you can now trigger new sequences in the song "in real time". 

New meta devices (Modulation / Automation Device fun)

• Hydra Device: Automate/change/broadcast multiple FX parameters with a single parameter. Think of this as a magic slider, which connects itself to up to 9 other parameters – allowing you to change multiple settings with just one slider or automation.
• Keytracking Device: Modulates parameters depending on an instruments key (note) value. Like what the "*Velocity Device" does with Velocities, the Keytracking device does with Keys/Notes.  
• MIDI Control Device: This device replaces the old "MIDI-CC Device", finally offering Pitchbend, Channel Pressure, Program Change & regular controller (CC) in a single device.

I hope to check this out in June when I can sit down and get back to production.

Ever feel music creation apps are too similar? Imagine an alternative universe in which music making software evolved along different lines. In this universe, the “tracker” isn’t some arcane novelty, but the detailed, bottom-up music editing approach that becomes the basis of music construction tools for any genre. Now imagine a breakthrough software release in that alternate universe.

Maybe it’s the Large Hadron Collider, but the release of Renoise 2 means that this is actually our universe: we have a cheap, community driven, unique app that runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. And it’s getting a big update Thursday – almost in time for my birthday (Tuesday).

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you picked the right moment to tune in. Renoise always had potential as a unique tool for music making, and with the shipment of Renoise 2, some very key pieces are falling into place. I’ve just gotten an exclusive look at what’s coming in the final release. Dac Chartrand has shared some details that weren’t previously public.

You heard it here first:

• Renoise 2.0 FINAL launches January 15, 2009, “8 years in the making, 4 months of beta testing.”
• Launch details on January 15 will be at http://www.renoise.com/launch/
• It’ll work with netbooks. Dac tells us: “Renoise can now be resized to fit on small Netbook screens. Here’s an interesting thread where a user reviews Renoise on his new MSI Wind U100:” http://www.renoise.com/board/index.php?showtopic=19175"
• Additional tweaks and bug fixes made it in, including Universal Audio UAD2 DSP support and latency compensation.
• Renoise 2 will support fraction BPMs, like 127.56.
• It’ll have new demo songs. “Two of the songs were selected from submissions by the Renoise community in a competition called "Beta Battle, Round 1 & Round 2". The developers chose their favorites and have included them in the final release of Renoise 2.0. More info here:” http://www.renoise.com/indepth/category/competitions/
• New native DSP effects: RingMod, Scream Filter

Read on for more details, plus tips on making this work with the tools you already use…

Renoise 2.0 New Features

Here’s the rest of what’s new in Renoise:

• Automatic plug-in delay compensation for everything – effects and instruments
• Latency compensation and fixing when recording
• Improved audio performance, lower-latencies on multiple CPUs on Mac and Linux
• Channel and polyphonic aftertouch
• Note quantize options, real-time quantize on record, nudge, and keyboard shortcuts

Plug-in improvements, including one big one:

• Mac AU support, removing the big obstacle for Mac users
• Multi-output VSTi/AU (that’s good news for Kore users, among others)
• Send notes to VST/AU effects (instead of just instruments
• Plug-in management improvements, including info, custom sorts, sort by manufacturer, hide, move, rename (and that was listed under “minor features”)

A lot of the best features are related to timing improvements. You will need to update old songs, but for new songs, there’s a lot of power. And this really gets into the significance of Renoise as a tracker, something I hope we’ll cover this year:

• Custom track delays for audio and MIDI to offset an entire track
• You can now set time via “Lines Per Beat” – how many lines in the pattern make up a musical beat. (That’ll make sense to tracker users and not to anyone else, but until we whip up a demo, just trust me that that’s a good thing.)
• There’s a delay column for fine-tuning specific grooves at up to 4096 parts per quarter (PPQ).
• You can set pitch and volume glides, independent of the “tick” of the sampler.
• In the future, Renoise will support “zoomable patterns,” piano roll for those who want it, greater timing accuracy, and other new improvements.

There are also tons of other improvements, performance tweaks, shortcuts, and other little features:

New in 2.0: Complete Feature List

Integration and Tips

Of course, the hype that usually accompanies software launches at NAMM and elsewhere usually has to do with convincing you the tool is the One True Tool you need, replacing everything else. That’s nonsense, of course. Just as in the pre-computer days, what made a studio productive was the right combination of gear and easy ways of connecting it, software lovers find combining software to be what makes them happiest and most expressive.

Dac passed along a few ideas for integrating Renoise. These immediately make me think of other possibilities, but here are a few gems to get you started:

Guide To Connecting Reason To Renoise: http://www.renoise.com/board/index.php?showtopic=15683

A workaround for sending SYSEX to your synth: http://www.renoise.com/board/index.php?showtopic=11777

GarageBand in conjunction with Renoise: http://www.renoise.com/board/index.php?showtopic=12590

Convert Renoise files to MIDI files using PHP: http://xrns-php.sourceforge.net/xrns2midi.html

How to use Windows VST on Linux: http://www.renoise.com/board/index.php?showtopic=15347

If you can’t wait until next week, there’s a release candidate available for download in demo mode right now:

See also:

Renoise + FM8 Drum Kit, Free Download: FM Meets Tracker [our own kore.noisepages.com]

Renoise 2.0 Public Beta Amps Up Popular Tracker for Windows, Mac, Linux

Wallace clued us in back in summer 207 that this would be big

And for pure, absurd fun:

Renoise Tracker Made Into Animation