Renoise – A DAW with a tracker-like interface | Hacker News Reader

Renoise – A DAW with a tracker-like interface

renoise.com

254 pointssph100 comments

One cool development in the past year or so are hardware trackers. Basically trackers for the DAW-less crowd. The polyend tracker [1] is really nice and a great value. And I'm super excited for the dirtywave m8 [2], kind of like a supercharged hardware LSDJ [3] (which is also a great project). Starts shipping in the next month or so, but you can already try it with publicly available firmware using just a teensy 4.1.

Back in software, can't help but mention Sunvox [4]. Not exactly the same niche as Renoise (which aims to be closer to a traditional DAW), but it's an excellent modular tracker that runs pretty much anywhere, free (as in beer) on desktop and cheap on mobile. It doesn't have any support for VSTs but comes with a nice set of synth and FX modules that can be connected and bundled into "metamodules".

[1] https://polyend.com/tracker/ [2] https://dirtywave.com/ [3] https://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/index.php [4] https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

Yeah, Sunvox is great, and Alexander Zolotov (its developer) has also made a lot of other innovative and interesting audio apps.

I'm a NerdSeq user: looking forward to the NerdSeq hardware tracker. The one I'm using is the Eurorack module.

That said, I've been a Renoise owner for years now. It didn't end up clicking for me as far as composing music on it, but that's mostly because I'm not really DAW-minded. I should probably see if I can use it as a live mixer as I think it'd be more efficient than Logic Pro :)

I'm not into modular, but I'm definitely looking out for the nerdseq portable!

I have a needseq as well, without having been a tracker user before and I still got the hang of it pretty quickly.

As far as DAWs go I totally recommend looking at bitwig, because it has the modulation capabilities someone coming from the modular synth domain would like to have

I've been using a Polyend Tracker for ~6 months and it's been such a fun experience. I'm by no means someone old enough to have been using trackers back then but the Polyend Tracker is has a really thought out interface enabling rapid prototyping as well as whole song production on it.

I thought SunVox is closer to low-level-ish purely modular synths/effect graphs like Max/MSP and Pure Data.

I know what a DAW is since I use Logic Pro X, but what is a tracker? What are they good for?

Trackers came before modern DAWs, a tracker used to be a sort of different way to compose music on computers, a sort of different kind of DAW, using a sort of notation, with time scrolling down, instead of to the right. It was popular for making music for early video games, especially when size was a big factor in creating music for computer games. But with the layout and and function you could do unique tricks that are very familiar with early VGM and Demoscene music

unique tricks?

I think they mean tricks things like reversing samples, or having a segment of an audio sample keep looping after starting playback so you could "stretch" it longer. Also pitch-shifting samples so you can play them at different notes.

Trackers were strange kinds of sequencers that were very focused on using samples to make music, and they were created at a time when memory was expensive, so you'd typically have fairly low resolution samples (8-bit 22KHz?), and people tried to use those samples creatively because you might not have many of them, both because of memory and hard drive space, but also because they weren't as easy to get as they are today. Most people didn't have the internet at home before the mid-late 90s, and even when people started to have the internet at home, it wasn't like today, the music making community was smaller.

I first discovered trackers in a French gaming magazine around 1997 or 1998, but they had already been around much longer. Said magazine had came with a CD that contained multiple different tracker programs and a collection of music files in different formats (MOD, XM, etc). The compelling thing was that these files were small, because they contained a few audio samples and the data on how and when to play them, so you could fit a tune that was multiple minutes in 1 megabyte or less.

For an example of what tracker software looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NjqNwHidpk

Here's a good recap of what sampling looked like in the time of Amiga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs

“Ta-da-da-da... aaaaaaand we're out of memory.”

Likewise apparently DJ Shadow pulled off quite a feat with his Akai MPC60 on ‘Endtroducing’, because the sampler could store something like twelve samples, also not too long.

A sorta related anecdote is how the British ‘mind the gap’ was this terse because it was recorded on a solid-state memory, costing dearly in '68 even for the small amount by today's standards.

Trackers allow note data to be annotated with various "effects", triggered via special codes. Some of these effects are things like pitch bends and filter adjustments, which can easily be done in any sequencer. However, effects like retriggering the current sample from an arbitrary offset or rapidly alternating notes in an arpeggio are fairly unique to the tracker workflow. It's not that you can't make those sounds in a conventional DAW, it's just that you probably wouldn't in practice.

So sort of composing something by sort of laying down samples in a sort of time line?

If Logic and other DAWs are like a modern IDE, trackers are like vim/emacs

A different way of working that is considered outdated or arcane by the mainstream, but proponents of them love the faster workflow and ability to control them with only the (qwerty) keyboard

Wikipedia has a good overview / history [1] and BasoonTracker [2] has a good demo if you want to have a go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker [2] https://github.com/steffest/BassoonTracker

Simplistic explained they are sequencers that can use samples. Trackers were used in the day to make old school Jungle/D&B songs.

Do you know of any tracker like options for the Eurorack modular format?

NerdSeq

See also the open source Radium

https://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp0wDH-OQlA - Radium 3.6.6 playing the demo song

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhwmT0G5EwM Radium Tracker - Quick 2Bars Only Demo (Renoise "maYbe"- Style, Piano Roll inlcuded..)

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7-hJx7Lir4 RADIUM - Tree of bugs song

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYGDUpr1uYs Radium: Esau - Massaker (2015, 4 voice polyphony, 8-bit, 0-29kHz)

https://www.youtube.com/user/KjetilMatheussen/videos

I'm intrigued by radium and I tried it once, didn't get too far. The feature set looks amazing, but doesn't seem exactly easy to use. I think this screen shot from the front page says it all. https://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/pictures/radium_6_0...

Is it really that much less unfriendly-looking than the original Soundtracker?

http://kestra.exotica.org.uk/files/screenies/59000/Soundtrac...

I am not a musician by any stretch of the imagination, but I fooled around with Soundtracker on my Amiga back in the late eighties, and most of that screenshot makes sense to me: upper left is a pattern being edited, with some graphical display of the waveforms added in along with some lines showing the envelope of volume/effects/etc (instead of having to type in hex numbers), upper right is some effects, and most of the bottom is a sequence of patterns, with extra tracks layered on top of that, which is a pretty neat addition to the traditional tracker way of working - make a sequence of patterns as usual, then add in other stuff in a horizontal format based on timeline-based DAWs.

I think familiarity has something to do with it, but your own screenshot is definitely way less cluttered than the radium one, which is showing A LOT. It's not just the waveforms, which I get, but also what seem to be multiple layers-within-layers of sequences or something like that. To be fair, I've seen other screenshots of radium that look a lot more sane. This one might just be arranged to show off all the things that radium has going on.

Oh yeah, your Radium screenshot is hella complicated - but the surprising thing to me is how much it makes sense for me, even though the last time I touched a tracker was back around 1998.

You could always try Orca: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/orca.html

holy fuck

Woah, that looks really interesting. I've long thought that the old fashioned hexadecimal columner way of entering effects on tracks is a mess. It looks like this lets you see envelopes, effects and more visually?

I might want to give it a spin to see if it's as intuitive as I think it might be?

Here's a very classic track in it https://youtu.be/ZGtlJKmGLNY

Radium came out in 2000? How have I never heard of this??

A search for Radium in the context of free music or recording software in the early 2000s would have yielded dramatically different results.

I'll explain the in-joke: Radium was the name of the premier, and to my knowledge only successful, "audiowarez" group. So if you were a teenager and you wanted to switch from Fast tracker II to "professional" tools such as Logic or Sound Forge, you'd likely find a pirated copy somewhere and if you did, it'd likely include an info file that said it was provided by Radium.

I have no clue who they were and how they managed to crack and spread just about every piece of super expensive audio software out there, but they did. I bet the vendors hated it but it was a life saver for us teenagers.

Only tangentially related, but I love this note at the bottom of the Radium download page:

> Information to warez groups

> Since the source is open, it should be simple to turn the demo into a fully featured version. Please let me know of any problems. (Just compiling the source is cheating!)

> Radium

There is close/save dialog box without buttons, you have to type yes/no. First time I see this in desktop app.

I'll probably not get another chance to shill for an artist using Renoise, but shemusic uses it exclusively as far as I know and has done some pretty awesome stuff with it, see Coloris for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIxFjXE_D0o

or Prismatic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNJzCaybzOk

I'm always happy to see linux compatibility in DAW software. $75 seems like a reasonable price for a license.

I'd love to hear HN community feedback on how this stacks up against Reaper (my current DAW) that's priced at $60 for personal use.

Trackers are very, very different from the clip-manipulation style of Reaper/Logic/Pro Tools. They are typically seen as being best for electronic music, though this is partly historical. You would be learning a whole new workflow for a DAW.

*clip-manipulation and MIDI arrangement.

Bitwig is a competitor to Ableton made by ex-devs that runs on Linux, and better in some ways

I gave my daughter a Nektar midi keyboard for her birthday, and it came with a license for Bitwig Studio. I saw that it was available on Linux and thought that this was fantastic. I'm sure that she'll get there eventually, but she's doing everything in Garage Band on an iPad at the moment.

She's 13, so she's still learning the ropes here.

Has it ever become stable?

Is it unstable for you? I've used it for a while without problems.

Haven't tried it in years.

I think the newer version even opens Live projects with varying results. You'll obviously have to swap out any stuff that came with Live since even the samples only open with the right license.

The main reason to use Renoise is if the tracker style sequencing is a productive process for you.

I believe there’s a minimal version called Redux, but that changes the workflow.

There is a free alternative. It isn’t native Linux and not as slick, but OpenMPT is meant to run in Wine and functions as a competent modern tracker.

I haven't used Reaper, but from what I can tell it's a traditional DAW with a piano-roll interface (with the closest free/open-source alternative probably being Ardour).

Renoise, on the other hand, is a DAW with a tracker interface. It's a very different workflow.

I paid $75 for Renoise about 6 years ago and it's been great using it on Linux via Jack. It works flawlessly and is highly polished.. it's as good as any other commercial audio application that I've used, but it's very different from anything that's not a tracker. I use it in conjunction with a lot of VST plugins that I run through Wine and some native Linux plugins from u-he, which also work great.

My impression is that most people use Renoise for making electronic music (which is how I use it too), for which it's very well suited.

In my own experience, however, using the usual tracker workflow is not that great for manual exploration, however Renoise has lots of free third-party Lua scripts that can help with that, and it's also great for manipulating and sequencing samples.

Here's a video on doing some advanced reverb processing with it: [1]

Lots of ways to use it.

The other thing I've heard that at least in older versions of Renoise (not sure how it is in the newest versions) it wasn't great for recording really long samples. So if you want to do something like record a live band's jam session or something you'll probably want to use something else. Renoise is best for working with shorter samples (or with synths or other VSTs or generating its own music).

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZnfyJqvM6s

REAPER is basically a Vegas Pro clone. As one of the early Vegas devs and a Mac user, REAPER feels like home to me. It’s solid, and it’s my go-to for time-focused audio editing when I need to move quickly.

However, as an old Scream Tracker user, seeing the sequence composition model alive today is a real treat. An entire lineage of loop timeline products owes its heritage to sequencers driving samplers, and it’s a really useful way to think about the macro structure of music.

Somewhere in my garage there’s a pile of floppies full of mods waiting to be listened to.

REAPER to me has been wonderful. Very light-weight and can do anything that the big ones do. It just doesn't come with a ton of it's own instruments and sounds like Ableton or Logic or others might. But if you have a ton of VSTs (like I do), it doesn't matter.

It's a very good DAW if you like using tracker interfaces. It supports sample-based tracking (the old Amiga style) and VSTis. It supports the usual sample effects, has it's own effects and can pretty comfortably use VST effects as well.

I haven't dug super deep into it, but it has a lot of automation options, and some clever ideas, but it's a very complex tool. I'm not entirely sure it's worth all that over a piano roll style DAW, but it's probably the current pinnacle of tracker-style tech.

It's very reasonably priced for what it is IMHO.

"it's a very complex tool"

It's definitely not simple, but I wouldn't say it's any more complex than, say, Ableton.

It's just a different workflow that more traditional DAW users aren't used to, so they'll have to learn. Fortunately there are a million great tutorials on it on youtube.

Most trackers, Renoise among them, could be characterized as a standalone sequencer instrument with some DAW features.

Renoise specifically is sampling-first. It has the gamut of typical sampler features and built-in effects, plus you have multiple ways to sequence everything(besides high-level pattern reuse across the song, you can abstract a lot of stuff into key-triggered sub-sequences or macro knobs). It has built-in effects, you can record automation curves and if you have something very specific in mind, there is Lua-based scripting and a little community of third-party scripts. In general, step sequencing is faster here than in any piano-roll based system, with the knock-on effect of it being extremely easy to build complex percussive sequences with a lot of timbral variation. Melodic lines and harmonies can be more frustrating if you are used to reading the piano roll to establish pitch visually. Renoise does have a tool to snap note entry to a scale of your choosing(with plenty of options for scale type) which smooths out the entry process tremendously, and if you're using a lot of block chords, they can be macro-ified as well to reduce the visual noise.

The VST support is OK. They recently started supporting VST3. I occasionally encounter glitches with it - particularly one longstanding one where it renders stuck notes - but not enough to dissuade me. Worst case, I isolate the problem notes and bounce them to samples(which is easy).

Renoise even offers their sampler as a VST called Redux, so tour characterization might not be far off.

Has anyone here used the Yamaha QY700 hardware sequencer? It's a hardware tracker interface:

http://www.vintagesynth.com/yamaha/qy700.php

I'm a tremendous Squarepusher fan and I've always been intrigued by the fact that he's done all of his sequencing since roughly 2001 on one of these. He's not doing any of it "in the box", so to speak. The QY700 is the sequencing brain for a whole lot of hardware and his custom Reaktor patches. It's clearly a huge component of his workflow and I imagine part of what enables him to be so musically divergent from everyone else (among his other outstanding qualities).

I'm such a fan (and also an experienced producer) that I've considered buying one and finally teaching myself to use a tracker with one of these.

I have no doubt that he's pushing the limits of what a tracker can do.

For those interested to see what Tom (Squarepusher) is about, here's a hop right into the deep-end for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmrsud1PpRk&list=RDwmrsud1Pp...

Also a fan of squarepusher! I can't find many info on the QY700 sequencing workflow, but I doubt it's what usually known as a tracker. I see some screenshots that look like a horizontal piano roll-based view. Trackers don't use piano rolls but instead a vertical textual grid-based representation (so time goes from top to bottom instead of left to right).

If it's like the older models in the series, it has a few different modes, one of which is the edit mode which is kind of like a tracker where you fine tune the notes and events that you first write in the step or the live sequencer

Hmmm yeah. It seems I've been looking at the QY700's pattern mode and was under the impression it was a tracker. It certainly resembles one and the results in Tom's music certainly sound like one. I know from experience that it would be absolute hell to program that stuff in a piano-roll, so it seems unlikely that he's relying solely on that. Hmmm...

Oh I wouldn’t put anything past him.

I've been a huge of the qy series for years. Bought a qy20 about 20 years ago in a thrift store because Tricky had said he wrote all his music in a qy10 (the even more rudimentary one in the series) and that's how i first learned to sequence music. Remember feeling very proud after finishing a clone of daft punks 'da funk' but also write a lot of bizarre experimental things, all gone now because i didn't know you need to open it up and replace the memory battery every once in a while. The limited, hard to use interface made you be very economic with your decisions, which spurred creativity, i would come up with ideas that don't happen when I'm in a modern DAW, just because I'd be staring so hard at those little numbers and tweaking then. Also had a lot of fun combining purely sequenced tracks with live recorded ones that I'd then tweak in the sequencer. The automatic chord sequence generator was fun sometimes but never really used it much. Then there was the way it kind of forces a series of song parts that you are supposed to use to structure your song (intro, main1,main2, main1tomain2 and outro if i remember correctly) which you could also bend to your advantage. I got a qy70 not long ago which i haven't given to as much love as my old qy20, but then again i was a bright eyed 20 year old with lots of time in his hands. The qy700, which i never used, looks like it's probably less clunky to use thanks to more buttons and screen real space, so i imagine it loses some of the creativity born out of extreme constraints part, but still makes you think different

I have both QY-70 and QY-100. Both great portable pieces to write full songs and arrangements. QY-700 is a studio powerhouse more like an MPC with way better music theory support. I think you can even have your custom groove templates and the live reharmonization is very cool. They are all very cheap I regularly see them in the 1-200 USD range.

I have one, they are cute & easy to use, and have neat sounds, and full midi. Amazing kit.

I have both a QY-70 and a QY-100. They do have a tracker like view where you scroll vertically and can insert midi events including NOTE, CC and Sysex. Not exactly a Polyend tracker but a very similar idiom. The cool thing about the later QY range is they have the unique feature of reharmonizing your patterns based on chords held in your left hand. My favorite units for composing on the go as they are cheap, battery powered and have all the sounds and presets (drums, strings, synths, ethnic instruments etc) to compose full songs and arrangements. Rock solid midi sequencing as well. Some sounds are dated but good enough to have something going that you can polish up at home with quality vsts. Check out Galcher Lustwerk albums to get an idea about the electronic sounds included.

To this day I did not find anything comparable in features and portability, OP-1 and OP-Z is great but not as well versed on all fronts.

I wish there was a newer version with sampling, that would be perfect.

This software reminds me of AudioGL - what could have been groundbreaking audio generation software that was being developed in 2010 or so.

https://youtu.be/bCC9uHHAEuA

I never found out if the developer had a sudden death or simply abandoned the project, but he completely disappeared one day and the project stayed in buggy pre-alpha for years. It wasn't vaporware - I had used it for a few hours and it was very cool stuff. Sadly I don't have the binaries anymore :(

I tried my hand at learning Renoise at the start of quarantine, after years of wanting to add tracker fluency to my skill set. I'm a regular user of Ableton, Logic, and Pro Tools and despite having a degree in computer music I've never been able to wrap my head around Renoise.

Does anyone have stories of the "aha" moment for them, or recommendations on how best to teach yourself? If I recall, the official tutorials were somewhat lacking. I'd love to see an experienced user describe their workflow and approach. I already know a tremendous amount about DAW's and production technique. I'm looking for someone to give a wide overview and describe what it does well.

If the trickiness is from the tracker paradigm, the way I got into it was to take existing projects and study them one track (column) at a time. You can find a bunch at https://modarchive.org/. Not sure if Renoise is compatible with historical tracker files, but there are links at that site to apps that do.

mike_h has some good advice, deconstructing other people's songs is a great way to learn Renoise. The forum was pretty friendly when I was active, and people post examples frequently, so that's a great resource.

I also recommend learning the keyboard shortcuts like the back of your hand. It really helps with keeping in flow and is one of the biggest advantages of the tracker interface.

Old mod creator here. (B00MER/kosmic aka kfmf) Most of the fun that disappeared with mp3s is such an ability to deconstruct another's work because of the similar appreciation for the same art.

I would spend hours upon hours pouring over any of my favorite tracker artists like keith303, purple motion, lizard king & c.c.catch, etc. even ended up flunking out of high school because the demo scene art subculture was really alluring to my younger self, as it just made sense to me & was something I thoroughly enjoyed.

To this day I can typically listen to any song and see the tracks, channels & notes in some regard. If you have no formal background in music but have an itch you can't scratch, explore trackers or even the more popular DAWs like Ableton. There's not much rules, so just have fun.

"Even if I'm the last person out there doing it, it's a quiet pursuit. It's, a personal pursuit & it's something that helps me get up in the morning." -dj shadow

Old creator here too. I miss the Fast Tracker days. I went so far as to have two Pentium II computers both running Fast Tracker, using MIDI clock sync between them then deconstructing source music from all those favorite tracker artists, playing partial multiple songs at once. It never got old, always fresh each time.

Then MP3s came out and the whole concept of trading source music for live remixing was lost. Another amazing thing was how compressed they were. I once put my favorite 1700 S3M/XM/IT/etc songs onto a single CDROM! That in itself is wild to think.

With tracking you kinda need to take that horizontal approach that's very similar in other typical DAWs rotate it.

It's 1994, you come across a demo copy off a local BBS of a tracker "tetra compositor" echo.mod playing over the 8bit mono soundblaster that time odd "tracker" made such magic happen.

Back in early c64 & Amiga days to achieve a lot of the results you were trying to achieve was how with such limitations. These limitations we're a good reason to posit how to do such.

To summarize, trackers have a fairly large cracktro/intro heritage. I mean most trackers from a distance looks like a spreadsheet with codes. A coder approach, as far as implemention goes is a pretty big key difference & the limitations of the time.

I'd be more than happy to help any way possible. Avid long time register ReNoise supporter & pusher ;)

Since you've got a history with the typical DAW workflow. Eventually you can learn to appreciate the coder centric ux/ui of barely touching your mouse. Kinda like a eclipse ide user finding vim, getting quick ideas down with nothing but a basic ibm keyboard makes it part of the low budget/barrier fun.

Long winded nostalgic post ...

NO CARRIER

My favorite choice in this space is Bitwig Studio. It has a workflow that's more similar to Live, but with fun modular features that will make power-users drool. Bitwig's modulation system is first-class, too.

I used to make some very bad music in Renoise on an old Thinkpad X61T. I had a great workflow going with the stylus and keyboard, and could lay down bad beats very quickly. Highly recommend Renoise for playing around. It's cheap, lightweight, and absolutely joyful to use.

I love making very bad music. I make it all the time, and find it quite joyful :D

Wikipedia page defining the term "tracker": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

IDM artist Venetian Snares uses Renoise. Here's a demo track he uploaded back in 2006: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U

He also uses it to control a gigantic modular synth setup

I came here to post this. Have it on copy. It's the first thing that came to mind when I saw "tracker" and to be honest I didn't even know it was done in renoise. I know a lot of chiptune music on gameboys is made with tracker software as well. This venetian snares video really is something else isn't it.

I'm working on an IDE for music composition. I'm releasing soon

http://ngrid.io

please stop

Any previews?

Cheap old Thinkpad, Linux + Renoise works well, especially if you add one of those old RME PCMIA interfaces. If you set it up so that it boots into Renoise It's basically like a standalone instrument, like a MPC or Octatrack.

Been using Renoise for about 9 years now, and I absolutely love it!

Post your renoise-made music here!

this is me: https://soundcloud.com/flipbit03/ibu-kid

Shameless plug, https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/Z9zMJ

I am a long time paid user of renoise. It was the perfect (affordable, surprisingly high quality and full featured) step up for me from earlier trackers like fasttracker, MODPlug, Psycle.

I’d suggest to view this super interesting presentation dir open source music https://youtu.be/dRM7wkMBSHY

Trackers might seem nostalgic, or as a quirky alternative. But they are also a forgotten was of dealing with musical pieces as a whole: everything a Musical piece is including notation, sound, performance and editability of all the parts and their whole.

Thank you, that was quite interesting.

still legend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U

Ha! Now I want to see Dax's 95 Raver's Megamix in Renoise :)

I had no idea there were alternatives to the FL Studio/Logic Pro-style DAW interface.

Here’s a cool video I found of someone’s workflow using Renoise https://youtu.be/SQ5jTaXywuM

There's another popular-ish paradigm: basically software modular synths, rather low-level so you create individual sounds by wiring the signals into graphs. Max/MSP and ‘Pure Data’ are the most famous in this style, they're often called ‘sound programming languages’ for some reason. I'm having a hard time finding a finished demonstration instead of a tutorial, but here's one for Pure Data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGiT55likdo

SunVox, mentioned elsewhere in the thread, is similar in the approach afaik, and works on many platforms (I first saw it on Palm and then Windows Mobile in mid-2000s).

CSound is sorta related somehow, but it's an actual textual language for generating sound.

There are also apps that look like hardware modular synths: VCV Rack is the most well-known and open-source; apparently Reaktor is in this vein too. And there's Hexen on Android. (Propellerhead Reason and Reaper both flirt with the modular approach, making you wire the signal between some modules, but they seem to have dialed it down, dropping unnecessary work for the user).

Lots of breakcore artists use trackers.

Brings back memories of the time I spent - hours, days, week-on-week - with my Amiga and OctaMED [0].

I may get this - I have tried and tried to get into the usual DAW workflow but each time I gave up - could not get used to them as the Tracker workflow is so ingrained into my mind.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OctaMED

Hoo boy do I have a video for you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV1McEtejxo

Just watched it - loved it!

I managed to rescue 3 of my old mods from an Amiga floppy a decade or so ago.

My Amiga 1200 still works but its internal floppy drive, which was an upgraded PC high-density format drive with its custom controller card, no longer works and from time to time I still look on the interwebs to see if I can source a replacement. Oh well, one of these days ;)

Thanks for the video link - enjoyed it a lot :)

Hitori Tori is a rather proficient user of Renoise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJY5u6cC7A

Frankly I barely have any idea what's going on in the video, as I've never got into trackers. Just, dude often needs three or so instances of Renoise at once, and handles them with a hardware controller.

Odd thing to see here on HN, it's been around for almost as long as FL Studio has (that is to say, two decades now). Still: yes, trackers survived into the modern day, and some are still getting updated to make sure that stays that way =)

I wish this was open-sourced. I wanted to do custom modal keybindings, because I find the current approach not to my taste. I like the idea of trackers and I will probably be using Renoise from time to time, but if it were open sourced, it would have been a great deal more useful to me. I mean, I asked for the feature on the official forum, but nobody answered. Would've coded it myself. Why keep it closed? Just why?

I always wanted to get into trackers but never got around actually trying. Just watched my favourite video about someone using a hw tracker [1]. This is so great and truly captures the experimental nature of using them!

[1] https://youtu.be/9TquD64S8v0?t=155

I recently got back into using Renoise on Linux and it's thanks to PipeWire - which lets you run JACK/Pulse/whatever programs at the same time with no hastle. It's super nice

It seems DAW means digital audio workstation.

I am ignorant on this topic so please excuse the dumb question. Is this like Garage Band but OSS?

It’s like GarageBand in that you can make music with it, but it’s not that it’s OSS, it has a different paradigm to the ‘sideways’ DAWs like GB but you program in vertical strips with samples to make your music.

Popular with some Warp record artists.

To add to the neighbor comment: trackers were around since the late 80s or early 90s, popular on computers like Amiga, and the interface was suited for low-res or even text-mode graphics. E.g. there's a tracker for Gameboy, called ‘LSDJ’; and a similarly restricted alternative for Android is Nanoloop: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nanoloop (at least afaik it's a tracker).

Is anyone here using these tools to teach kids? If so, did you write it up?

It’s a lot of fun to use it’s a nice tool to use along with reaper

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