Renoise FAQ

Platform Questions
Plugin questions
Reporting bugs
Performance issues and multicore FAQ
Timing issues / MIDI issues
Pattern Editor
File-Formats
Rendering problems / Questions
Keyboard shortcut matters
License matters

Platform questions
Lots of Linux VST plugins seem to crash Renoise, i thought Renoise was stable?
Renoise is, unfortunatley this is currently not true for a lot of VST plugins in Linux. There are not so many native Linux VST plugins yet and those that do exist may be ports from Windows or Mac and quite often don’t work reliably as well. The VST plugin development in Linux is still in its early beginning-stage so this may take a while before VST plugins become more steady.
If you desire to work with Linux VST plugins make backups of your songs often is our only current remedy against the issue.
More Linux related questions can be found right here.

Plugin questions
Renoise doesn’t recognize plugin X on Mac OSX or plugins that used to work on 1.5 now are no longer listed
Renoise 1.5 was still a PPC build, since 1.5.2, universal binaries are being distributed. If you want to use VST plugins on the Mac, be sure that you use the universal binary of the plugin and be sure you can download a universal binary of that plugin before you purchase it for use in Renoise. PPC VST plugins don’t work on Intel Macs and won’t be recognized by Renoise and there is nothing we can do about that to fix this.

Can I send MIDI Data to effect plugins?
Unfortunately this is not yet supported, yet as it is a reasonable standard in most other applications you don’t need to doubt this will be supported one day it is just a matter of when currently.

Does Renoise support VST plugins with multiple output streams? No sorry, Renoise does not support these options of such plugins yet. This one is also on the to-do list. There are more ways to Rome to achieve this functionality though, join the boards and ask for the answer.

Plugin X does not work as expected in Renoise (while it does work in Host X)
It might be some specific triggers have to be changed for the plugin specific, like multicpu support or buffering type. Report the plugin behavior on the community forum and we’ll help you to sort this out.

Does Renoise Support AU plugins?
At the moment no, but a lot of preparations for AU support are in a far stadium so you can expect AU support somewhere in the early Renoise versions of 2.x




Reporting bugs
Renoise crashes, hangs or has problems with song x, plugin y or system z
To identify a bug in Renoise we need you to have a little basic understanding of how an audioapplication works.
If you work with internal sample-instruments and internal effects only, you can be pretty sure a problematic behavior concerning crashes or hangups may be a problem inside Renoise itself if it is easily reproductable by different users having different systems. When external VST plugins or VST instruments get involved, there is also code involved that is not always influencable by the Renoise programmer.
A VST plugin is actually an application on itself running inside an Audio host environment which is called Renoise here. (could also be Logic, Cakewalk, Cubase etc.)
Your system can also have a few hardware flaws (such as memory problems, powersupply problems, a faulty audiocontroller or resource conflict (IRQ/DMA conflict causing degraded performance of key-hardware like GPU or audio controller).

What matters is that no two system configurations are the same and a true Renoise bug usually is reproductable by other users.

There are a few things that you help us out with if you want to file a bug report:
- Can you reproduce the problem easily? Describe how, what plugins and samples are involved, post or mail your example song online or to the developer if necessary.
- If the problem involves plugins, did you attempted to try the plugins in a different audio host like cubase? Do they perform stable there? Does the plugin has known errors and did you tried to contact the plugin developers or if availalbe, requested help on the plugin-site its forum?
- Supply your system specs, are you using a Mac or a PC and what is your system configuration? (CPU, Memory, GPU etc.)
- If you have plugins involved, try to narrow down the root of the problem by removing plugins one by one until the problem does not occur anymore. This might be a combination of plugins that do not work well together, it also can be one plugin that is buggy or being treated different than required, the last case might be resolved with a change in the configuration file. (you will be instructed to try these when suspected)
- If the problem regards choking audio and similar: try to figure out if your system has conflicting IRQ/DMA resources with other heavy resource demanding devices. (GPU and audio sharing IRQ/DMA addresses or communication devices like modems and / or network controllers that share IRQ / DMA with audio controllers do not always result in the most ideal performance situations). Also try if you have the latest drivers. If you have an external device like USB or Firewire, check your chipset drivers. Firewire audiocontrollers are known to operate pretty normal on systems that have a Texas Instruments chipset. Currently there are no known chipset manufacturers that are capable of handling audio-related firewire devices the most optimal.
- Submit your Renoise log-file in case of crashes, hangups or break-outs (see for log-file locations and more known errors)

Performance issues and multicore FAQ
Songs take ages to load in the latest edition of Renoise, what’s up with that?
Songs are written in xml format, if you use VST’s that can use a lot of VST parameters and MIDI properties, Renoise needs more time to load them depending how many different MIDI and vst parameters are different from the default values.


Renoise and multi-cpu / multicore HT cpu support, how does it work and when does it work?
Renoise 1.8 and lower cannot handle multicore CPU’s. On PC’s having HT technology, one of both cores is turned off by default. But on Intel based MacOSX, this is not the case yet. If you can somehow set the CPU affinity to make Renoise only use one core, you won’t have to fear crashes. Also, one user reported to be capable of running Renoise fine on a multicore CPU when using an emulated environment (or a virtual pc environment) that only uses one core.

Renoise 1.9 supports now multicore CPUs.
Here is what you can expect from it and what not:
Hyperthreading CPUs are not supported.
They will be treated like single CPUs as our testing results did not show any real performance gains, or even worse: They cause a performance degrease.

Why? HT Cpus are “faked” multicore CPUs. Realtime parallel Audio processing (the way we use the multiple cores) can not really be handled by them.


2 CPUs = 2x performance speedup?
Unfortunately its not that easy. Handling multiple CPUs first costs the engine a bit of performance (you need to take care of the multiple “audio streams”), but this is in overal not very much. The amount of this overhead is visible when enabling/disabling the multicore support in an empty song (not playing back anything). Then Renoise has to split your song int “independent streams” that the CPUs can then handle separately. In complex songs with a lot of send tracks and devices this limits the sharing capabilities a bit, which means that the performance is not very well balanced.

In practice this means that the speedup will be something like 1.2x to 1.6x, (on OS X even up to 1.8x) per CPU, depending on wich song you are running.


Multicore support in VSTs
Some VSTs already provide multicore support (like Kontakt), so Renoise wont be able to process such VSTs faster than before.


Taskmanager shows the same CPU usage as before!
This is not because all we did is faking the Renoise CPU meter wink.gif, but because the overall application performance does not increase. Let my try to explain why:

Lets say you have 2 CPUs and run a song in Renoise 1.8:
When the CPU meter showed 100 percent in Renoise, Renoise only used 100 percent of !one! CPU. The other CPU idled around then but you could not go beyond the 100 percent in Renoise. Taskmanager would have shown an overal CPU amount of 50 percent then, as your other CPU had nothing to do at all.

If you load this song in Renoise 1.9, the CPU meter in Renoise will show something around 60 percent, Taskmanager will still show 50 percent. The overall performance is still the same, but you now have 40 (100 - 60) percent free for more FX and stuff in Renoise!


I experience big CPU overloads even while nothing is being played
if you have got an AMD dual core system (such AMD FX2), you need to download the dual core optimizer


My keys sometimes seem to stop responding or i can’t hit a certain short-cut combination for a short period of time.
The current keyboard handling in Renoise seem to have some quirks, this is being resolved by a tight monitoring system that resets the keyboard status every few instants of a second. There might be moments that you notice this minory keyboard session hanging. Just wait and it will resolve within a sec or two.


Timing issues / MIDI issues
MIDI synchronisation is way off in Windows!
Getting tight timing on Windows is a pain. The OS was never made to support high precision multimedia timing. Renoise 1.9 supports WDM drivers, these are most tight drivers available. If you haven’t selected them yet you are advised to try the WDM variant first.
If your external device does not respond to the signals through the WDM drivers either your audiocontroller on your PC does not support WDM drivers properly or your external device lacks MIDI signal handling that would also not nessesarily be required. Master Keyboards that only send signals are pretty tight with the regular windows drivers so the difference between WDM and the regular drivers would not be really noticable in this scenario.
Renoise 1.8 and lower is using the oldschool MIDI interface in Windows (MME), like most others audio applications do, which gives no opportunities for better timings. Using Direct Music (Cubase uses this) could fix/improve that, but will bring even more problems, as not many MIDI drivers support Direct Music. To get a really tight timing, you will need to support the MIDI via a non standard Interface. Thats what Cubase does with its own distributed Harware, but thats nothing we can do.

For 1.8 and lower you can improve the timing in Renoise by using very low Audio latencies. The lower the Audio latency, the less is the jitter you get. OSX doesnt suffer from all these problems.

I use the WDM drivers, timing is still not optimal
What happens if you minimize Renoise during your play? If the timing issues disappear, you might have a graphic issue. (Lowering the GUI frame rate value in the preferences, might help you ensure this source).

I can’t select WDM drivers, it says “failed to initialise WDM drivers”
Renoise can’t control MME and WDM drivers at the same time.
Make sure that you have no MME drivers selected on the other MIDI panel properties (MIDI out and MIDI Clock Slave). Best is to set all to “no” at first and then select the WDM driver for each option.

My VST plugins jitter or do not synch well to Renoise
It may depend on the situation that is at hand, but most VST’s synchronise timings with their host via tempo values. Renoise has a custom settable tempo (BPM) and a real bpm that is calculated upon the tick and custom bpm value.
As long as you use these tickvalues: 1, 2, 3, 6, 12 (Renoise 1.8 or higher only!); You should not be experiencing too much synchronisation problems as the custom bpm value will match the exact bpm value. If you use a tick-value that is not in the previously mentioned table, the true bpm value might be off a few decimals and not all VST plugins can handle this correctly. If you do configured tempo to supply rounded true bpm values, there might be an issue with the plugin instead, or your CPU performance might not be up to the task. This depends how much CPU consumption is indicated in the upper-right corner of Renoise during performance.


Pattern Editor
When I enable edit mode a red line appears on the pattern line I am on (like a highlight but completely red) This will dissapear when edit mode is then disabled but return again when switched on. The red line appears on whichever line the scroll bar is on at the time, appearing and dissapearing with edit mode being switched on and off. I searched the forum for this but couldn`t find this bug listed. I am guessing I am the only one experiencing this as it is quite an obvious bug to spot and no other post (as far as I have found) has yet been made. Can`t find anything particular in my setup triggering it yet but will report back if I do.
Sorry, this is no bug. It’s a side effect when editing the line’s values. Here’s the whole story:
One of the problems with real-time line editing resulted in amongst other direct change of automation values when one value was entered in the effectcolumn with editstep set to 1. This also resulted in other automation values being changed that one didn’t wanted to change at all, but because this happens if the cursor jumps to the next row, it was really annoying. So to prevent this from happening, the play-line will remains in it’s current position until you press enter. It is actually the last “played” line in the field. Which is not really true when starting edit mode. But that’s how the logic is being set. Just press enter and scroll again… you’ll see the bar has moved to that row. ‘’ Hmmz.. i’m typing in effect command values in the pattern editor, but my cursor keeps going to the next row everytime i insert just one value. This is the same for adding notes and volume/panning values. This is pretty frustrating, how can i keep the cursor on the same row when editing stuff? Set Edit Step to 0 with hotkey [lctrl]-[0] so the cursor doesn’t advance when typing a value in a field.



File-Formats
Hello, I would like know if renoise is able to save / export any RNS production to another format like .MOD, .IT, or other?
I have to disappoint you, but we dont try to mimic other trackers. renoise will only save its own fileformat - that would be xrns. Mod, it and xm are supported import formats though. The import features are still not perfect - and they wont be, since we dont emulate other trackers, but try to adapt the effects to match renoise specific ones. MIDI export is currently in development through a third party solution as well as that you can download other third party solutions to make life easier.


How do I load MP3, AAC, OGG Samples into Renoise?
Renoise does support importing of mp3, aac and ogg samples only via an external decoder plugin. You need to install Quicktime in order to be capable of loading these formats.
Renoise for Linux currently has no native Mp3 support so we are working on this at the moment.


I can’t load pre 1.1 Renoise / Noisetracker files anymore!
Download the 1.27 or 1.281 demo editions and they can save it to an rns format that you can import in the latest edition of Renoise (Update V 1.1.1 has been made available for download as well) .


Rendering problems / Questions
The render to disc feature, it doesn’t work while render to sample does (1.5)!
If you downloaded the public demo, this feature is disabled. Render to sample is an internal option and qualifies to the benefits of having as much features within the range of the unregistered edition to get the best idea if Renoise is the program you like to work with.


Does the rendering options for the Render To Disk influence the Render to Sample options?
No they don’t, (in the Demo edition, the rendering options themselves aren’t available) render to Sample will be done using the default settings (that will be cubic interpolation and 16bits and the sample-rate configured in the audio configuration)

How about 24-bit sample formats?
24 bit samples are actually special kind of 32 bit samples (24 bits of integer, plus 8 bit of mantissa), so that’s why you won’t have any problem. (When routed to your 24-bit audocard.) 24-bit format samples are now officially supported since Renoise 1.8.


Okay, if i play 16 bit samples at a 24 bit soundcard (fixed in 24bit), what does renoise with the other 8 bit ?
Renoise plays 16-bit. The missing byte is ignored by the soundcard (but there have been ideas to use the extra space to add some nice noise). Since it’s the least significant byte, there is no consequence. We’re talking about the dynamic range between approximately −90dB and −140dB.

More info: http://www.24bitfaq.org/#Q1_3_2_2

I’ve composed a song using various instruments and samples, but none of my MIDI instruments are rendered.
MIDI instruments are being broadcasted across a different audiochannel outside Renoise, Renoise cannot input or throughput audio from your MIDI devices. You can however attach the Line out from your MIDI device to your Line In on your soundcard (or route your internal MIDI wavetable device to your wavemapper) and use recording software like Audacity or Audition to record the audio to disk from either the line-in or the wavemapper if you use an Internal MIDI wavetable instrument set. You can mix the audio with your rendered output from your Renoise song or if your PC can handle it, you can record the whole wavemapper to your external recording software including the Renoise audio output. There is no other way this could be solved in any program. The more luxury composing applications next to Renoise may have an Audio-In or Audio Through sampling routine, but this still requires your PC to be capable of Live-rendering your song and not all PC’s are powerfull enough to do this at full quality without hickups and crackles.


I’ve been using VSTI’s, some do not render properly (frequency is too low or too high)
Some VSTI plugins have a fixed play-rate. If they have a fixed rate of say 44Khz and you have setup your rendering mode to render your song in 96Khz, there is a chance your VSTI sounds twice as high and twice as fast. The Renoise developers however has no influence upon this if the VSTI won’t respond to frequency and bitrate changes in your audio environment configuration of Renoise. Best way to circumvent these problems is to render your songs in 44Khz. In some cases a VSTI-plugin only polls for the current frequency setting during the first initialisation (e.g. when assigning it to an instrument slot) so just saving the song and reloading it could also solve the problem in that particular case. If you change the frequency rate during composing your song and you notice that some instruments drastically change their behaviour, this is already a good sign of the (various) VSTI’s limitation.

Keyboard shortcut matters
I want to restore the default keyboard shortcuts, how can i achieve that? Do i need to reinstall Renoise?
Since 1.8, there is a reset button in the configuration panel of the keyboard shortcut settings. It should recreate a new keyboard bindings list based upon the default installation set.
If this does not workout however, you don’t need to reinstall Renoise to reset your keyboard settings. Close Renoise. Under Mac OS go to your_home_directory → library → preferences → renoise → v1.5 (or the corresponding version you’ve installed). Under Windows 2k/XP go to Documents_and_settings\Your_profile_home\Application_data\Renoise\V1.5. In there you will find the KeyboardBinding.xml file, delete that file. Start Renoise again and all your keyboard settings are reset to the default settings. As soon as you close Renoise then, all settings will also be stored to a newly created KeyboardBindings.xml.

License matters
I registered on the forums at Renoise and logged onto the site, but i can’t download the registered edition… What am i doing wrong?
By registering we mean purchasing, not creating an account at the forums. You will find more details here on how to register Renoise.


I read that when i register i need to download the registered edition from a specific site, where is this site?
When you registered Renoise, you will receive an email with your username and your password and a link to the site where you need to use those credentials. Be sure to use a valid email-address during registration else you will not receive email that contains your license info.


I registered Renoise, but i didn’t receive my email with my license data.
Did you supplied a valid email-address during registration? Does your internetprovider or your email-client use spamfilters, try to check if the mail could have ended up in a trash or spam-folder of your emailclient or your ISP’s webmail environment. If you are sure that you supplied a valid email address and you did not received your email within 48 hours, contact one of the Renoise team members and try to supply as much data you can (date and if possible:time of purchase). Do not send your creditcard information through email! You will never be asked for this either by any member of the Renoise Team!


Which platform version of Renoise do I register when i pay?
If you register you may choose the software for the specific platform to download, there is also no real limitation how many copies you can download. If you desire all Mac OSX, Linux and Windows edition, this is fine with us as well and so you can download a copy for each platform, more times than one.


How long will my registered license last?
If you register 1.x, your license is valid for updates up to 2.x so if you register 1.281, you may download updates up to 2.281 (if this version is going to be released, keep in mind that the yy decimals in x.xyy releases are usually only bugfixes)


How much does a license cost?
The final edition since 1.5 is set to fourty-nine Euros (full price) and ninety nine cents (administrational charges). (€49,99). You will not be able to register an earlier edition anymore.


Is the license for one PC/MAC only or can i use it on other pc’s/mac’s as well?
The license is a single user license upon name. Your name is imprinted in the software. As you are the only user allowed to use the registered edition of Renoise, we would advise you not to use the software on any other machine than your own. This may include more PC’s / Macintosh machines in one room.