The tireless developers behind the modern tracker Renoise announced a new beta on Tuesday. While the devs themselves are calling this a “maintenance and improvements release”, they’ve introduced enough bug fixes, new features and workflow improvements, along with multiprocessor support, that any other company would have slapped a new major version number on the top and called it a day.
Here’s a short list of the changes:
- Multiprocessor support
- Much-improved preset handing for internal FX devices, including user presets & A/B preset compare buttons
- MIDI driver improvements: support for WDM drivers and improved timing on MME drivers
- Improved MIDI Clock Slave support, with more live jamming-friendly features
- MIDI device sharing on Windows
- MIDI hot-plug support on OS X
- Automate-able states of internal devices
- A whole host of new internal FX types: Bus Compressor, Maximizer, Chorus, Distortion 2, Gate 2
- Also adds a new “Velocity Device”, which lets you automate other FX parameters via the (MIDI) velocity of live played or recorded notes.
- Many improvements to the LFO device, including user-drawn waveforms
- Various improvements to other internal devices, including the EQs, Gainer, Delay, Flanger, mpReverb (now v2), Phaser, Compressor, etc.
- Added beat, 09 effect, ms and sample rulers to the sample editor. For working with sample offsets using the 09 effect, this is a godsend.
- NNAs adustable now per sample, rather than on entire instruments
The full list with more detailed descriptions is available here: http://www.renoise.com/board/index.php?showtopic=13301
Quite the list for a humble point release.
While Renoise might not appeal to you as a sequencing solution (I myself have pretty much stopped using Ableton Live and now do everything with either Renoise, Five 12’s Numerology or my trusty MPC), you have to respect their responsiveness to their users. This is a company that actually listens to its users and works at near light-speed to fix outstanding bugs.
For those of you who have never worked with a tracker before, don’t be mistaken: Renoise is not a toy, but rather a serious tool for music (noted users include Venetian Snares and virtually the rest of the breakcore community). Given its 49.99 Euro pricetag, I’d say it’s the best bang-for-buck sequencer on the market.
Ed.: I’m eagerly awaiting ReWire support and/or ability to run as a plug-in, to make it easier to integrate this app with others (though it does support plug-ins). But this looks otherwise terrific. Let us know if you’re using it, or if you give it a try.