Renoise is a professional digital music creation package.
As it is based on mod trackers, it will display the music in grids called patterns. These patterns are similar to sheet music, but use an alphanumerical notation, not a musical notation.
The program has a neat interface that will offer you all the information about the tracks you have saved in your hard disks. It will also give you access to every tool in the program that you can use to edit a track. Finally, Renoise includes a Media Player that will let you hear your work while you are modifying it, or after you have concluded. While playing the song, the program will show you information according to the options you have selected. "Track Scopes" will show you the waves generated by each one of the synthesized instruments, "Master Scopes" will show you the general wave for the left and right channels, and "Master Spectrum" will display the total spectrum achieved. You can add instruments to your song, or delete some, modify the beats, and the volume of each instrument, and input parts through the keyboard.
The trial version of Renoise will not render songs to .wav or selections to samples. As Rewire Master, only the first stereo input bus will be available. As ReWire Slave, Renoise will occasionally generate a small subtle hiss.
v3.0.1 [Mar 2, 2014]
Supercharged instruments
- With Renoise 3.0, a lot of what makes Renoise special in the first place - the tracker interface, the flexible effects and routing - has now been integrated into its built-in sampler. This feature-set should make it interesting to sampling-library aficionados and synthesizer freaks alike.
Per-sample envelopes and effects
- It is now possible to define unlimited envelopes (modulations) and create internal effect chains within instruments. And each sample can be freely assigned to any (one) modulation set or effect chain.
Modulation Sets
- As mentioned, you now have the potential to add envelopes on a per-sample basis. In fact, there’s a whole section dedicated to working with just modulation envelopes, using an approach similar to how DSP effects are processed: combining basic building blocks together to form more complex envelopes…LFO, ADHSR, Key/Velocity tracker, Fader.
Effect Chains
- The number of built-in effects in Renoise has grown over the years - everything from workhorse effects such as chorus, delays, EQ, etc., to the more specialized “meta devices”, which enable parameter routing between devices, and across tracks. Essentially, these effects are great for sound design and can transform any sound into something completely different. You can create (any number of) internal effect chains, and assign a sample to any chain - including the ability to route between effect chains, exactly as you would do with tracks in Renoise.
Keyzones and overlapping layers
- A common feature in many samplers will allow you to define groups of sounds that should be played randomly, or in a sequential order, each time a key is struck at a certain pitch and/or velocity. For example, an single acoustic snare might actually be made from four different recorded hits, each one sounding slightly different from the rest.
Real-time performance options
- Input Quantize: When recording notes into Renoise, you have always had the ability to quantize the time to a certain amount of lines. With Renoise 3.0, you can now also define the time resolution when playing instruments. This is obviously a huge improvement if you like to play a sound live, with crystalline timing precision. Possible quantizations include line, beat and bar.
- MIDI Note Range: Also, the MIDI input for an instrument can now define a lower and upper note-range. This, along with the ability to link a certain OSC/MIDI port to your instrument, means that you can now achieve keyboard splits within Renoise itself (no more need to fiddle around with MIDI loopback devices).
- Harmonic Scales: Furthermore, the instrument will also allow you to make use of harmonic scales. Common scales such as Harmonic Minor, as well as more exotic scales are available from a list, and applies to both the Sampler, Plugin and MIDI parts of an instrument. When you are recording notes, the currently selected scale is applied to those notes before they are written into the pattern.
- Mute Groups is a well-known feature from MPC-style samplers. One of the most obvious uses for such a feature is when recording a drum kit with open and closed hihats - if you are aiming for a realistic sound, you would never want the open and closed hihat to play at the same time. In Renoise, this is now easily achieved by assigning the open and closed sample to the same mute group. The Mute Group feature will work with live playback of notes, but also as notes are manually entered into a pattern/phrase.
Instrument automation & macros
- You can control most parameters via automation, or map them directly to an external controller. In itself, the flexible solution for automating instrument parameters is done via so-called ‘macros’, of which you can define up to 8 per instrument.
