Who says every music production tool has to be either a traditional DAW or Ableton Live?

Not Renoise, for one. I’m running out of things to call it. Modernized tracker? Tracker on steroids? Music production tool from an alternate history in which conventional DAWs were ignored and everybody just kept on using trackers? How about this: a gem that a tiny development team somehow keeps making more awesome with regular updates with misleading names like “point 8.”

So, what does “2.8″ give you? A couple of OS compatibility fixes and one new delay effect? Wrong. New in this release is a massive set of improvements. 64-bit is in there, but in terms of day-to-day use, the workflow improvements may be what really matters. (Okay, I usually cringe when I see “workflow improvements” in a press release, and here I’ve gone and used the same phrase. Let’s just say it’s “more awesome to use.”)

The new Renoise Pattern Matrix aliasing means powerful arrangement and compositional tools.

Highlights, condensed:

• 64-bit for everybody (Mac and Windows in addition to existing Linux support), so you can access more than 4 GB RAM. A bridge plug-in lets you use 32-bit instruments and effects, and there’s 64-bit ReWire support.
• Pattern Matrix now lets you alias and clone pattern slots. It’s a powerful arrangement feature that’s a bit different than similar block arrangement or clip launching features in other tools (both because of Renoise’s approach to patterns and clips, and this ability to use those aliases to create structure). Expect some follow-up.
• Collapse tracks and groups (see image below), giving Renoise some of the screen economy that made trackers famous. Route those grouped tracks, and use pattern effects across grouped tracks (also something relatively technique).
• DSP multitap delay. (Yes, there’s that, but also…)
• DSP repeater (“stutter”) effect.
• DSP Exciter.
• New pattern effects: Tremolo, Auto Pan, Set Envelope Position. (That last one sounds like it could be pushed into some insane places.)
• Meta Mixer lets you combine modulation signals. (It’s really a meta device – imagine combining what Ableton does with Devices and Reason does with Combinator and CV devices.) Improvements to other modules, as well, both aesthetically and in parameters.
• Improved editing in Sample Editor, including destructively rendering slices to individual samples, and editing features typically associated with waveform editors rather than tools like this. My favorite: cross-fading loop creation, which previously required jumping out to another tool (Peak, SoundForge, etc.)
• More performance: Hyper-threading on new Intel chips.
• More spectral views and editing, more envelope editing views, Favorites for devices.

And there’s a lot more, as well.

http://www.renoise.com/new

You've got to love the ultra-compact track collapse feature - ideal for 11" MacBook Airs or Linux netbooks.

You also get features like this: “up to 34 DSP devices can be addressed via pattern commands 1xyy-Yxyy.” Power users know instantly what that means musically. The rest of you – well, don’t worry, other parts of Renoise will gradually level you up to that kind of ninja insanity. And Renoise is humanizing things, as well: “Logical mnemonics for pattern effects from A to Z instead of cryptic numbers.”

Will everyone drop everything and use Renoise? Odds are, no: this tool remains an acquired taste (though don’t dismiss until you’ve given its unique workflow a try). But, then, that’s part of the joy of this: it’s not an “industry standard.” It’s just an incredibly terrific music making tool that proves that not all music making tools need to look identical.

Now that I share the same home city as the developers, I think I owe you more information from the inside. Stay tuned.

Renoise 2.8 is a free update for current users, and an insanely-low 58 € new.

http://www.renoise.com/

Renoise’s scripting interface is something special, allowing people to build anything they imagine in a way that’s directly integrated with this production studio – no add-ons required. But whether or not you yourself want to code, that also means access to the imagination of the Renoise user base. And one of the most impressive shows so far is an ambitious process to duplicate Ableton Live’s mixer and clip launching interface inside Renoise. We first saw that effort at the end of the year, but it’s now about to reach a whole new level.

Now, in fairness, part of why people like me would like to see people use something other than Ableton Live onstage is to see different performance modes on laptops. And this absolutely doesn’t do that – you’ll see that the interface is more or less a clone of Live. (And I’ve been known to be critical of such interface cloning.) But there are two advantages. One is, doing this in a script in another host is a fascinating exercise in learning how to maximize the potential of Renoise’s scripting, one that could lead to other things. The other is, it’s possible that the familiarity of environments that work like the Live Session View could help performers ease into new ways of working with Renoise – without having to make the leap all at once. Renoise itself offers a very different way of working, built on tools of yore – basically, an alternative music-making path in software design entitled trackers. Like being able to go for a burger, fries, and ketchup in a foreign town, the availability of Cells could help those foreign to the tool moonlight between Ableton and Renoise in their work.

If nothing else, it’s something of an engineering triumph that this works at all.

In version 2.0, now in beta, a complete rewrite of the code vastly expands what’s possible with Cells. CDM readers took a lot of interest in this development when we covered it last, so it’s great to see what may be possible as the code matures.

And in some critical respects, Cells now does things in an integrated fashion that aren’t in Ableton Live. Pattern riffs, built on Renoise’s unique instrument paradigm, encapsulate samples and sample mappings together with your patterns. Bi-directional controller support, while eventually grafted atop Ableton (particularly for certain supported controllers), is part of the framework. There’s also integrated network sync support inside the tool, all implemented atop OSC; it’s still in beta, but shows lots of potential. (That’s possible in Ableton using existing MIDI and network tools, but seeing the server inside the tool is impressive.) And these are the kind of areas where it’s hopeful we’ll see new ideas in Ableton and rivals alike – another reason choice is a good thing.

From the forum post, forwarded to CDM by the creator:

Cells! 2.0 is a complete rewrite of Cells! 0.9. This has been based upon further code experimentation and user feedback. However, due to the improved approach and cleaner code, it has been possible to add many more features.

Thanks to Void Pointer (http://soundcloud.com/void-pointer) for kindly supplying the samples used in the demo video.

Realtime ‘Granular’ Timestretch

Cells! 2.0 allows realtime timestretch in a ‘granular style’. This allows full independant control of both tempo and pitch while still keeping playback syncronised to the beat. Granular timestretch applies to samples which have both a beat sync value and autoseek enabled but beat sync is disabled.

Realtime ‘Slice Based’ Timestretch

Similar to the ‘granular’ timestretch, Cells! 2.0 adds support for sliced loops with independant tempo and pitch control. Each slice will be played back at the correct time to maintain the overall tempo of the entire loop. Slice-stretch applies to samples which are sliced. The length of the cell is assigned through the beat-sync value.

Pattern ‘Riff’ Storage and Playback

Cells! 2.0 allows you to quickly save individual pattern tracks as riffs for use live in Cells!. The riffs are stored in compressed format within the instrument itself, so you can quickly and easily save all samples, sample mappings and riffs self-contained within a single XRNI file. Note that any Renoise instrument is be supported. This means you should be able to send note riffs to external instruments or VSTi’s.

Live Jamming Mode

For specific types of samples, Cells! 2.0 allows real-time ‘live jamming’ playback mode. Play your samples directly with either the mouse or a physical controller for improvising over your mixes to add that extra sparkle. Individual slices from sliced loops and plain one-shot samples can be played in ‘live jamming’ mode.

Bidirectional Controller Support

Cells! 2.0 now has its own native controller framework. This allows full bidirectional support for supported hardware controllers. Livid Instruments Ohm64 and Novation Launchpad (beta) are available with the inital release. If you would like further support for any additional controllers, feel free to either send them to me for development or contact me directly to work together and implement support.

MultiFX

Cells! 2.0 incorporates a simple ‘DJ style’ effects processor into the main UI. Effects supported are a low-pass filter, beat repeat, delay and phaser. All effects are controlled through simple common amount and rate controls. All time based effects are syncronised to the beat.

Sample Preparation Tools

Cells! 2.0 incorporates simple methods to quickly create and prepare samples for use. Both the sample editor and the sample list box contain a ‘Cells! menu’ from which the sample can easily assigned to a specific playback mode and length. A ‘sample report’ feature is also available which allows you to quickly identify how the selected sample
will play within Cells! 2.0.

Additionally, Cells! 2.0 allows quick rendering of either entire patterns or specific tracks within patterns from your existing songs. Only the instrument of the first note within the pattern track will be saved. It will automatically assign the correct beat sync values even if the original song is not written at 4 LPB. All rendered samples will be contained within an ‘Unsorted Cells! Renders’ instrument within the song to easily allow saving of all samples to disk. This menu is present in the pattern editor context menu.

Multiplayer Networking (beta)

Cells! 2.0 has built in support for up to four machines to link together over a lan (via OSC) and keep in sync. Make huge mixes across multiple machines or get some friends around and all play together. Setup network connections on the master and ensure Renoise OSC servers are running on all machines.

Minor improvements

- Variable channels from 4 to 16.
- Variable cells per channel from 4 to 16.
- Variable cell height and width (for touch screen usage).
- Automatic sample selection option (for waveform view in the sample editor).
- Safe cueing option to automatically mute cue output if set to the
same as the main audio output.
- Single output mode (splits the audio so master output on one
channel and cue output on the other).
- Slightly tweaked user interface to cater for the additional features.
- Better audio routing (A/B crossfader or crossfader bypass (M))
- Various other optimisations (too many to list)

Downloads

Download the updated 2.0 beta manual here (http://www.box.com/s/evt2vnpb51hzj6kic1zg). The XRNX tool will is attached to [the forum] post. Please ensure you read the manual, most questions will probably be answered within. Cells! 2.0 Beta requires Renoise 2.8 beta 7.

Download and forum post:
http://www.renoise.com/board/index.php?/topic/33947-cells-20-for-renoise-28-beta/

Let us know if you put this to use; we’d love to hear how it works (particularly network-synced jams). And, hey, there’s nothing stopping you from using this alongside a machine running Ableton Live – even on a Linux laptop.

What an extraordinary thing an interface can be, a map to making music.

A new community-generated album from users of the now-legendary monome grid instrument yields a variety of musical outcomes. The results are instrumental and lovely, breaking off on lots of different stylistic vectors, but glued together by the notion of key and pitch. Let’s let contributor Joshua Saddler explain this – and the holiday album – as well as share some of the music. If you celebrate Orthodox Christmas or more generally the idea of “Holidays” (ahem), or if you just like good music, you can overlook the fact that the latter arrives a bit late on the Western calendar. But both albums are terrific, and I suspect the approach to the music in key, to sharing samples and field recordings, could well be an inspiration in your own music-making endeavors. Sometimes rules are liberating.

If you want to get a jump start on musical New Year’s resolutions, I can think of nothing better. Joshua writes:

The monome community has released not one, but two albums for the holidays. Both are freely available at http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com

The first, MCRPv11 (Monome Community Remix Project, volume 11), was released mid-November, five months after the MCRPv10 album (which CDM has previously covered).

http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com/album/mcrpv11-all-keyed-up-edition

As with all MCRP albums, there are guidelines and a theme. Participants submitted a field recording and a short instrumental sample in the key of G/E-minor. The participants then chose as many samples as they wished from the shared pool (though they couldn’t use their own samples), and had a couple of weeks to assemble their tracks. Sounds ranged from falling rocks to ocean waves to modular synthesizers to toy ukeleles and dogs barking. From this pool emerged fifteen startlingly diverse tracks.

Have a listen, and head to Bandcamp for downloads in any format you desire:

I appreciate the chance to see Joshua’s process in video:

I’m pretty pleased with how my contribution, “mnml autmn,” turned out:

mnml autmn by ioflow

I sequenced bits and pieces from four samples with Renoise (in some cases using single-cycle waveforms…so it still counts, even if it sounds nothing like the original!), exported sections to loops, and performed them live with rove (http://docs.monome.org/doku.php?id=app:rove) on a monome 128. I recorded and rearranged the resulting segments using Ardour3‘s timeline view. The tracker and the traditional DAW actually worked well together. As I’m the sole Linux musician on the album, composing and arranging takes much longer using free software than more common tools like Ableton Live. Things that took me hours are probably three-click operations in Live. Still, by having to strike out on my own, I learn so many new things each time I sit down to create…it’s worth the occasional frustration at not being able to do things the easy way, using the same process as everyone else.

The second release is the annual Monome Community Christmas Album volume 2, made available on December 21.

http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com/album/monome-community-christmas-album-volume-2

This project had much more leeway; no hard-and-fast rules about samples or themes. I ended up forgoing the monome entirely for this album, instead improvising an original acoustic piano piece:

gloria by ioflow

http://soundcloud.com/ioflow/gloria

There were fewer participants for MCXAv2, since it began immediately after MCRPv11, but the quality of the tracks is still extraordinary. Warm neo-retro-loungetronica. I’ll be listening to it year-round, not just in December.

Me, too. And perhaps you, as well:

Thanks, monome-ers!

http://monome.org

In a marvel of DIY engineering, one intrepid user of the tracker-made-modern music making environment Renoise has reconstructed the basic elements of the Ableton Live interface. With quantized clip launching on channels and even a crossfader, it’s unmistakably a copy of what Ableton does. I don’t think you’d dump your install of Ableton for this; the whole reason you’d want a feature like this is really if you prefer other elements of Renoise that are different from Live. But as a proof-of-concept, it’s pretty extraordinary. (Ableton users, the ball’s in your court: someone want to make a tracker in Max for Live?)

mxb has more information on the Renoise forum:
Cells! Preview

We love the bleeding edge, but as mxb notes, “this is still at a very early beta stage; if anyone has any suggestions or feature requests, [they should] make them in the thread on Renoise forums.”

All of this is possible because of Renoise’s powerful scripting environment.

The Cells! video above is a bit primitive – mxb says it’s a result of poor screen capture software, which is also responsible for sync disappearing – but you get the idea. mxb has also built a four-oscillator synth called ReSynth, and previously-mentioned sample import.

http://tools.renoise.com/users/mxb [all of mxb's creations]
http://tools.renoise.com/tools/resynth

FL Studio, beloved to its users by its original name “Fruity Loops,” has long had a Playlist mode that could be used to assemble simple live performances by jumping to sections of your music.

But a new alpha mode takes this mode far further. It’s still based on the Playlist, but can add clips dynamically – including Audio, Automation, and Pattern. While still in early testing, developer Image-Line has released some information about how triggering works, as well as the video above. And oddly enough, just like the video we saw earlier this week in Renoise, it employs a Novation Launchpad controller. (The impact of the monome on the market is really hard to overstate.)

More details from the developers:

Controllers

Keyboards – There are 12 Clips assignable to each Playlist Track (one octave of a MIDI controller per track)

Launchpad & Mouse – Unlimited Clips assignable to each Playlist track.

Other Pad based Controllers – Limited only by the number of MIDI note assignable pads

At the moment there is basic scripting to define extra pages on the launchpad, you’re able to define actions for buttons, among transport ones, notes & controls.

The CPU load is similar to the project as it would play normally.

Performance Mode [Image Line forums]

It’s not quite an Ableton killer – not yet, anyway, especially as it lacks Ableton’s unique Session View paradigm for working in this way. It’s even a bit short of some of the hacks we’ve seen for Renoise. On the other hand, if you’re an FL fan you should be able to make your performance plenty sophisticated – and since just trigger clips isn’t everything, you might also want to play along with an instrument or sing. And I could see this catching on. It’d be great to see something other than Ableton in live laptop performances. Variety is the spice of life.

Rating: very, very promising.

Previously (this week, no less): More Renoise Step Sequence Goodness: Launchpad + Lauflicht (Other Controllers, Too)

Thanks to Dario Lupo for the tip!

There’s a beautiful immediacy and tactile quality to hardware step sequencers. And there’s all the flexibility, convenience, and power of software.

Solution: combine them.

We’ve been following various custom creations for the music production tool Renoise – the latest being a lovely performance grid, and back in 2009, the beginnings of Launchpad grid sequencing.

You can thank Renoise’s powerful API, which allows its users to modify the way the app works with surprising ease (at least for the hack-inclined), all for free.

The latest is Lauflicht, an 8-, 16-, or 32-step step sequencer for the Novation Launchpad controller (or, alternatively, other controllers like the monome) and Renoise. What’s nice about it is, you can add as many tracks as you want, with whatever samples and instruments you want, but then trigger those steps from hardware. Now, this will appeal of course to those who want these kind of regular rhythms – I’m already anticipating some frustrated responses from our fans of non-duple rhythms and polyrhythms in comments. But if that is what you want, this looks fantastic.

The creator sells the tool for EUR24. How much that means to you is dependent, of course, on the stability of the Greek government. (Sigh.)

Side note: rockin’ domain name.
http://www.stepsequencer.net/

Via BrenMcGuire on CDM comments – thanks!

Lots more videos; check the site for the artist’s own techno tracks:

If you just want to fire up Renoise, the modern tracker/music production app, and not worry about the fact that its innards are hackable, you can. But for a reason why you might at least want to explore customization of this music tool, give the video above a look. It starts sleepy and slow … and then, part of the way through, as creator Dac Chartrand starts demoing the tool, something really special happens. (Anyway, that’s what I think. See if you agree.)

Dac explains his work, completed at the recent Montreal Music Hackday:

My Renoise hack was Grid Pie. One of the new trends in our community is the concept of a meta-interface. In essence, programmers use the Lua API to transform Renoise into something else, hide the Renoise window, and work with hardware interfaces connected to their own scripts. Three current examples: MPE, Step Sequencer Lauflicht and Duplex. Grid Pie is “yet another meta interface.” It turns Renoise into a live performance audio recombination machine. Still in alpha, but people were into the demo I gave. I got a lot of handshakes and positive feedback.

It’s an alpha, so your mileage may vary, but I’ll bet this whets some appetites for people who hadn’t yet realized the power of the Renoise API.

http://wiki.musichackday.org/index.php?title=Grid_Pie

Ed.: Hacking Web databases to search sounds, remixing tools to automatically create dub tunes, cameras to sequence and analyze images in new ways, Montréal hackers have been busy. Trevor Knight writes from the event with full coverage from Canada, latest outpost of this global music coding phenomenon:

Music Hack Day made its first appearance in Canada at the end of September, painting the event with a Montréal flavour, complete with bilingualism, Montréal-style bagels, and even an appearance of Stephen Harper in a hack. Over the Saturday-Sunday event, musicians, programmers, and hackers scramble to create any sort of new music project.

With the help of dozens of laptops, gallons of coffee, several APIs and staff from such companies as The Echonest, Soundcloud, and Grooveshark, the assembled hackers churned out and presented 24 hacks in 24 hours.

Bruno Angeles took home first prize for his hack, FaCeQuencer, which uses computer vision and a webcam to control a squencer/looper and at the same time, outfit the user appropriately to the style of music.

Free Assembly, the hack from Graham Boyes, took second prize and recreates a target sound using a database of samples. It uses The Echonest Remix API for the analysis and finds target sounds sourced using Freesound.org’s API. The power of this hack was clear when Graham demonstrated using a drum and bass track as the target sound and a recording of a dog playing in water as the sample.

With a heavy presence of students and researchers from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media Technology (CIRMMT) and McGill University, several of the hacks incorporated data-mining. For example, David Weigl, Hannah Robertson, and Andrew Hankinson created wuzhear, a venue-based database of historical concerts in Montreal from the Montreal Jazz Festival website and last.fm’s API, including set information and playable with a Grooveshark widget.

The Wub Machine 2.0, from Peter Sobot, automatically creates Dub or Electrohouse remixes of an audio sample, while The Beatbox Machine allows one to record beatboxing and return a drum sequence replaced with actual drum samples.

For a complete list of hacks, check out http://wiki.musichackday.org/index.php?title=Montreal_2011_Hacks

Now that Canada has tasted the sweet Music Hack Day nectar, there’s already buzz for a hack day in Toronto.

Dac Chartrand (Renoise) writes with more details. Dac has his own set of hacks, but I’m excited enough about it that I’ll put that in a separate post -PK:

Other "Renoisers" were on site, but used the 24 hour session to try new ideas, but not present them. For example Steve Sinclair (Radarsat1) tried to port Mark Zadel’s Different Strokes to Android. Different Strokes resembles a freehand drawing application. The drawn strokes create animated figures whose motion is mapped to sample playback. The musician performs by assembling networks of strokes live, generating audio patterns. Steve got drawing and particles working but not enough time to hook into the Android audio subsystem, so he didn’t bother presenting.

Longtime CDM readers Studioimaginaire were also on site hacking away at their multi-touch table. They were there the full two days but also didn’t bother presenting. I tried to talk them into it several times, saying that the crowd would obviously vote for them just on cool factor alone and that they would walk away with a prize, but they stuck to their principles. Something to be said about the vibe of the event. Hackers were there to have fun.

David Viens of Plogue made am appearance for the demo session Sunday afternoon.

Good times had by all.

Music Hack Day is an event that’s been gaining lots of steam. Packing engineering experimentation into a marathon session of collaborative, improvised work, followed by lots of sharing, the event tends to focus largely on Web services but also includes novel musical instruments and other inventions. The events have grown in depth, quality, and attendance – the New York event I attended was just massive. (See the intro video below.) And now, for the first time, there’s an event in Canada, in the tech-rich Quebec hub of Montreal. Since we’re talking Canada events, the timing is perfect to mention it. I very much hope one of our Montreal-based CDM readers makes it out and tells us how it goes — and since Dac Chartrand of Renoise is out there, it’d be really brilliant to see some Renoise hacks this weekend! Take photos, take videos, make stuff, and document the stuff you’ve made for global fame on CDM! Ahem.

Dac tells us a little more about the event, as well as work to do return Hack Day to Boston and London, below.

Dac writes:

# MHD-MTL:

There have been 15 MHD worldwide so far. This is the first in Canada.

http://montreal.musichackday.org/2011/

The organizing team consists of myself (of Renoise) and 6 post-graduate students at CIRMMT (http://www.cirmmt.mcgill.ca/ ). e.g. Alastair Porter (also of EchoNest), Mahtab Ghamsari, Corey Kereliuk, Trevor Knight, Mark Zadel, and Brian Hamilton. We also have support from local startups, some people at the SAT, local universities, and a variety of other orgs and locals who have been following our Google Group in the last few months (http://groups.google.com/group/mhdmtl )

We’re updating the MHD-MTL page every other day now. Lot’s of action for the organizers to say the least. A good place to start is with the French and English fact sheets on the page; bilingual PDFs trying to represent Montreal, of course. We also have a poster that people can put up to help out, DIY style.

# MHD-MTL Location:

The event will be held at Eastern Bloc. (http://easternbloc.ca/index-en.php ) Eastern Bloc is an exhibition and arts production centre dedicated to New Media and interdisciplinary art. The vision at Eastern Bloc is to explore and push the creative boundaries in digital and electronic arts, audio/video installation, multimedia performance and other emerging practices.

# MHD News:

According to Dave Haynes, there are upcoming events in London and Boston. No dates yet but definitely soon. Keep watching the MHD front page or the Twitter feed. (http://musichackday.org/ , http://twitter.com/#!/musichackday )

From Roel and Johan who organized the May 2011 Berlin event: “As a first attempt to open source an event, we (@roelven, @freenerd) put a retrospekt of our learnings on Github, inspired by @arrelid from Spotify. We also shared the docs we used to give to sponsors and locations, this could be of help for you guys along the way. Have a peek here: https://github.com/musichackday/organizing-a-music-hack-day ” The Montreal team intends to commit their experiences to this repository after our event, as well.

Good stuff. Seriously, hope someone can make it out there and tell us how it goes.

I remain interested in the idea of doing a virtual hack day for CDM readers. Face-to-face is great and irreplaceable, but it could be a chance to bring together people from across geography, too.

Renoise 2.7 is now available, following some eight weeks of testing by the community. The update, which the developers describe as “back to the beats” in reference to focusing in this release cycle on musical workflow, delivers plenty of features that make the modern tracker more modern. I wrote about them back in March, with some detailed Q&A from the developers – including tips on where to get started:

Renoise 2.7 Adds Sample and Slice Savvy; Tips and Inside Info from the Developers

The short version: better automation, sample slicing, and sample keyzones, plus improved DSP and audio routing and MIDI routing, make Renoise more usable. For people slicing up and sampling audio, even, I dare say, MPC-style, it’s a huge release.

2.7 Release notes

But that’s not the only story here. Renoise are also announcing 500 MB of free sounds designed by Puremagnetik, all in the native XRNI file format. That’s from a sound house better known for Ableton Live sounds than Renoise. And, at the opposite end of the spectrum from preset soundware, Renoise is involved in a Berlin Music Hackday that could bring new DIY features to the tool – plus tooling that makes it easier to grab and update tools from the community.

We’ll start with the Puremagnetik news. Rather than just tell you about the sounds, Puremagnetik’s Micah Frank shares how the sound set was built, and what they learned about making soundware for Renoise. That includes some valuable tips for anyone interested in programming sounds in the environment, as well as insight if you’re just curious to try the resulting sound pack free. Micah shares:

About Puremagnetik: Puremagnetik is a sound development company that I founded in 2006. I had freelanced as a sound designer with Ableton for some years and didn’t see many 3rd party choices for that platform. Puremagnetik was launched as an affordable subscription service offering new “Micropaks” every month, with a focus on Ableton Live content. That was 5 years ago and we are continuing to produce new packs every month. As of this writing we have almost 60 Micropaks in the catalog, a number of bundles, standalone libraries and Max for Live content. We have close to 40k registered users and are working with a number of developers (desktop and mobile) to help realize their sound libraries. By the time you read this, we will also be offering content in Renoise’s XRNI format.

Why Renoise: Always on the lookout for products that break away from conventions, I became interested in content development for Renoise soon after the 2.6 release. It’s obvious that Renoise is created by a small and dedicated team of developers backed by a strong, supportive community. To my surprise, I couldn’t find many resources for Renoise format instruments. All of the above reasons factored into Puremagnetik’s conception in the first place – to fill a niche within a community of dedicated individuals that are passionate about their work. Once the Keyzone Editor was introduced, it was clear to me that someone had to make content for this innovative product.

What it was like making the 500M sample pack: The first thing we did is comb through our entire catalog and pick a well-rounded selection of kits and multisample instruments. We are working with an independent developer (Renoise user MXB in building a tool to translate our libraries to XRNI. [That tool is now released; see comments. -Ed.] So this was a huge asset in efficiently building this library. After importing the sounds they were fine tuned and tweaked with modulations and envelopes. The final step was exporting the monolithic XRNI files. Throughout the entire process we worked alongside the Renoise team to ensure that Q/A standards and selection of sounds was spot-on.

Thoughts on the latest XRNI format: Despite its simple interface there is a lot going on under the hood. I personally love the “point” setting in the envelope params. And the selection of filters really kicks ass (my favorite is the Low Distortion). Just in coupling these two things, one is presented with vast sound design possibilities, and that’s before you beat sync pitch envelopes!

For the most part, editing is very intuitive if you have previously built multisample instruments. The instrument editor is still in its infancy so there are some parameter persistency issues that need to be ironed out. It is somewhat cumbersome to save variations of the same instrument as it saves each one as a single monolithic (flac compressed) file.

Overall, it’s easy enough to dive into the editor, tweak the available settings and resave the instrument however you like.

Room for improvement in the format: The most valuable thing for us from a development standpoint is sample grouping capabilities. Our instruments really become 3 dimensional once we can program group modulations based on user events. Our TeeBee instrument for example is heavily dependent on groups of samples to create a realistic emulation of the original TB303. So this is a feature I would like to see implemented.

I would love to be able to save track DSPs with the instrument but perhaps that could conflict with Renoise’s native architecture and workflow. However, this capability when combined with Renoise’s effects and Meta Devices could open enormous possibilities for sound design.

More LFO waveforms with an even slower frequency would be very welcomed into my Renoise sound design toolbox!

Each parameter setting has 4 envelope preset slots but these are currently shared between parameters and are only session specific. It would be really cool to have independent preset buttons per parameter that save with the instrument. That way, the user can load it up and call any number of combinations for instant sound shaping variations.

Velocity crossfading.

Visit Puremagnetik at http://puremagnetik.com/ — you’ll see new Renoise-format sounds starting to appear.

Included in this pack:
Analog Synth Basses
Circuit Bent Drum Kits
Buchla Drum Kits
Mellotron Strings and Flutes
Glitch, Toy & Lo-Fi Sounds
Fender Rhodes Mark II
Model-C Clavinet
Electric Guitar
Upright Bass
Classic Analog Synths
Grand Piano

And there’s more soundware free with this release, too, I see from the Renoise site:

Additionally, Berlin based artist and longtime user Beatslaughter has blessed us with a touch of evil in his sample pack “Beatslaughter SoundPack Volume 1″.

Those two sample packs total over 800 MB and let producers jump into all the latest sampling features of Renoise 2.7. The packs are free for all registered users new and old, and are waiting in the Backstage.

Get Your Tools Faster

It’s like an App Store for Renoise hacks: tools.renoise.com has gotten an upgrade, and there’s a new automatic updater called the Tool Updater. Combined, this should make it easier to keep your tools fresh, and customize Renoise to do what you need. I’m a huge fan of the lightweight hacking mechanism they’ve built into Renoise, and the fact that it’s an integral part of the software.

Hack Renoise

As a mentor at Music Hackday Berlin, if you happen to be in Germany later this month, you can learn how to hack Renoise from the developers. I’d love to see some new projects. (I may even try to see if I can drop by, if I’m in fact in England around the same time!)

Renoise will be mentoring at Music Hack Day Berlin. The event takes place on the weekend of May 28th in the MTV Network offices located at the Spree river. Erik, dblue and Taktik will be on site to discuss Renoise, the Lua API, drink beer, and give out high fives. Check our community forums in the upcoming days for more details.

Background/info:
http://musichackday.org/
http://vimeo.com/7129735
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/02/music-hack-day-nyc/
http://fuse.tv/music/music-hack-day/
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/digital-and-mobile/midem-2011-can-hacking-save-music-1005009032.story
http://blog.programmableweb.com/2010/02/03/48-hours-31-hacks-stockholm-music-hack-day/

And yes, I’ll happily, happily share any interesting hacks or creations here on CDM.

Of course, there’s plenty here to enjoy in Renoise even if you don’t hack – you can grab some free sounds and go play! Let us know what you think.