Back in the day before Ableton Live and Reason and all the other sequencer apps out there, desktop electronic producers made do with trackers: apps which allowed the budding Moby or Paul Oakenfold to sequence samples. They were basically software equivalents of legendary hardware sample sequencers like the Akai MPC. These usually had all of the usability of a 1957 Trabant and none of the good looks.
Renoise 1.9.1 sequences like an old-school tracker, but it's got loads more features: plugin and MIDI instruments, effects chains, a halfway decent mixer, and even internal sample editing. Everything a growing music geek needs to make bleep-bleep music (and maybe more). It's available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS 10.3.9+ as a Universal Binary.
At 49.99 euros (US$75.80 at today's exchange rate) for a license, Renoise is a helluva lot cheaper than alternatives like Live or Reason, and the ability to use a single license for versions running on multiple platforms is nice. The only drawback is that the interface appears a little complex for users unfamiliar with the conventions of sample trackers. Also, the demo version times out and doesn't allow rendering of your tracks out to .wav format.
I still have nightmares about using FastTracker on my old Pentium II back in the late '90s, so I haven't tried this one myself. If you have, drop me a line in the comments and let me know what you think.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-09-2008 @ 1:45PM
jollyllama said...
Music related posts on TUAW = Rad. Keep it up, there's a lot of Mac based musicians out here.
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5-09-2008 @ 1:46PM
Chris Roth said...
Fasttracker 2 was like my holy grail all through junior high and high school... I made like 300 songs with it... I know it like the back of my hand... And I gotta say... I've waited like 15 years for something like ReNoise...
It's pretty daunting to someone unfamiliar with the tracking mentality... but it was amazing how many FT2 shortcuts carry over... not to mention all my old .xm files load in ReNoise too... 16 bit sound... VSTs.... it ROCKS!!!
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5-09-2008 @ 1:49PM
nathan Johnson said...
I'm really excited to see more of the things you'll be posting. You seem rad.
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5-09-2008 @ 1:59PM
Jonathan Brodsky said...
I am not a super heavy user of renoise, but I have done quite a bit on it.
It is way nicer than the old FTII interface as soon as you start playing around with it. Everything is accessible behind right click menus if you need them, and configurable keyboard shortcuts if you don't.
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5-09-2008 @ 3:56PM
Chris Hill said...
I used Renoise a little while back, and boy, I was impressed. Being a fan of FastTracker 2 tho, I'm not sure how familiar the conventions used will be to new users. I'm nowhere near a professional musician, but Renoise is a lot of fun.
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5-09-2008 @ 4:52PM
booyaa said...
or you could try milkytracker which is free: http://www.milkytracker.net/
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5-09-2008 @ 5:22PM
G said...
I used MIDI (timing slop), many hardware samplers (expensive), and drawers full of floppy diskettes (which were slow, small and could just 'go bad') until the software side matured. Not that it was any better, obviously. Sometimes I finish a song now and I have this feeling that I haven't spent enough time on it yet. I need to find that feeling. Find it and crush it.
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5-09-2008 @ 7:43PM
Ernie Smith said...
Strangely enough, I currently have this program loaded on my machine right now. Been using it for about eight months. It's very very cool for what it is. It's surprising, really, that it hasn't gotten more attention.
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5-09-2008 @ 7:55PM
Mo said...
I spent days at a time in FastTracker II, and ScreamTracker 3 before that. I often yearn of the obvious keyboard-driven granularity of a tracker when I'm using Logic or GarageBand.
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5-10-2008 @ 12:01AM
germdisco said...
I spent a few years writing tunes in Scream Tracker 3 and Impulse Tracker 2. Since moving to the Mac, I have used Reason, Ableton Live, GarageBand, and (naturally) Logic. I'm very happy with Logic, but I can imagine some projects in the future where I'll want to go a little oldschool and produce a piece of tracked music again.
It's nice to hear about apps like Renoise, and see comments from other tracked-music enthusiasts!
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5-10-2008 @ 4:11AM
Gerard said...
Glad at least one person mentions the multiplatform, often updated, very cool REAL tracker!!!
I have been running Milkytracker on my Mac and Windows mobile phone (before I bought my iPhone) for years!
http://milkytracker.net/
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5-10-2008 @ 4:45AM
Johann Lau said...
rabid renoise fanboy with "yay" and a correction :)
the demo does not time out! beta versions do (but by then there is a new beta or a release versions that doesn't time out - it's only to make sure peope don't keep using potentially buggy betas)
after a while, the demo version starts displaying a nag screen every now and then, but you can then still keep using it.
Cheers!
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