Fully agree with this, it was a big reason I switched from Live years ago. I don’t know if Live has improved since but it always felt sloppy to me, I think it’s designed with some slight built-in lag to cope with hiccups when playing live. Renoise isn’t really designed around playing live at all but feels very tight by software standards.
Slightly tangential but one of my favourite things in Renoise is this hardware sampler tool. Very easy to set up sampling of the whole keyboard range with as many velocities as you like while you’re doing something else. Obviously this kind of sampling works better on some sounds than others but it’s a good way to get fake polyphony and/or multitimbrality out of things.
Right, so out of irritation at DPC latency issues on my Thinkpad (and the knowledge that any other Windows PC can also fall foul of this at basically any time) I’ve bought myself a base model Mac Mini and a monitor. I had an iPhone for a few years but otherwise this is pretty new ground for me!
Obviously with Renoise the keyboard is a huge deal so I’m putting some thought into the best way to approach this. I still have my Thinkpad and main living room PC so I’m thinking buying a normal, full-sized PC keyboard will probably work best in terms of keeping things consistent. I know I’ll probably run into some issues with certain shortcuts in MacOS itself but since this is a dedicated Renoise machine so I’m not too concerned about that, unless anyone else knows of any significant potential headaches I might run into?
Bit of an open-ended question really but I was just curious if anyone else had experience of going from Mac to PC or vice-versa and if they encountered any particular sticking points along the way on the keyboard front.
Depending on your specific keyboard you might have issues accessing the Fn key (which all Mac keyboards have) without the use of 3rd party configuration tools and that brings limits for certain things, but outside of that there are no notable issues with using a PC keyboard with a Mac.
Of course getting used to the modifier key differences is probably a bigger thing to worry about.
Thanks, yeah rooting around in the system settings I noticed you can swap the modifier keys. That’ll make Renoise’s mapped settings a bit more confusing to keep track of but at least the option of putting things in the same physical spot is there. Decades of muscle memory are a killer, especially with something as keyboard-heavy as Renoise.
Thanks, that’s pretty useful. I was mostly wondering if anyone here has had been using one long term for Renoise.
I’m considering setting up a little dedicated system just for Renoise, I’ve got a Raspberry Pi 3 atm but I’m not convinced that would be sufficent, a 4 or 5 seems like it would be fine but tbh I might end up going for a cheap mini PC.
Close to finishing my first track strictly in Renoise. I find the hardest part in switching from a horizontal daw is arranging but my head is slowly getting it.
Mainly the traditional methods of chopping and sequencing breaks. Also that its just fun to take a different angle on producing. Stuff comes out different. Hard to know if its better or worse though. It starts to feel very satisfying to navigate the daw with only the keyboard. A bit like working with the octatrack for me.
