Another round of beta testing has passed, a brand new stable and rock solid Renoise is ready for production.

In case you missed it the first time around, new features in 2.5 include:

• Pattern Matrix: A birds eye view and editor of the song
• Cross Track Routing for “Meta Devices” and new devices like the “Signal Follower”, which allows you to sidechain other tracks parameters
• Plugin Grabber: Render Plugin Instruments to Renoise Instruments, Samples
• Vastly Improved MIDI Mapping
• A Bunch of New Internal Effects
• And much more…

A detailed description of what’s new can be found on the Renoise 2.5 launch page.

We’ve also rewritten the user manual from scratch and published new video tutorial specifically geared towards using Renoise 2.5.

We’d like to thank the Renoise users for all their help durring the beta phase. It’s you that makes Renoise the world class audio application and community that we are today.

Registered users can download their personal copies from the backstage. New users can download and try out the demo.

Oh, and one more thing. Let’s celebrate!

The first Release Candidate of Renoise 2.5 is now available. Release Candidates are the last steps before declaring the version Final.

That means if you are an unregistered user, you can finally download the demo. Together with the registered users we have intensively tested and finetuned the release during the last months. So we expect it to be rock solid.

Renoise 2.5 has a ton of new features. A bird’s eye view of the patterns. Improved MIDI so you can map your controller to almost every button or slider. And more, too much to fit here. For the complete overview, have a look at What’s New in 2.5.

Renoise 2.5 Special Offer Price

As previously announced, the price of Renoise will be going up to 59 Euro when 2.5 Final is released. Until then you can buy Renoise for 49 Euro.

We can not pin-point the date for the 2.5 Final release. We test Release Candidates as long as necessary, to prevent a flood of unnecessary updates later on. All we can say is we expect the 2.5 Final release within the next few weeks.

This is your last chance to take advantage of the offer to buy Renoise at the lower price, so don’t miss it!

New Renoise Shop

We have updated our Renoise shop with better international support and new payment options to make registering Renoise easier and cheaper for you. We now support Directebanking, PayPal and Bank Transfers without extra transaction fees. All common credit cards are of course welcome as well. From now on, payments are taken care of by our friends at Avangate.

For more information, see the overview of Avangate’s Payment Methods. If you have other questions about the new shop, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Remixta exclusively features works from the Renoise community. Podcast Number 7 is now avilable at: www.remixta.net

Tracklist

• 1. Overcoat – Evaporative Aircoolers
• 2. Bytesizeerror – Post
• 3. Kaneel – Backyard Bataille
• 4. Sodiufas & Fluffy Dryad – Forest Dub
• 5. Hseiken – Chase The Cats
• 6. Metylonia – Imagined Beauty (WIP)
• 7. Braintwister – InLove
• 8. Cyvergence – Hypnotic (Album version)
• 9. She – Ride (From album “Orion”)
• 10. Vivace – Bad Hare
• 11. Structure Theory – Baby Seals

On Friday the 8th of January 2010, Renoise.com was targeted by hackers.

To prevent any further harm, we immediately shut down the server. We then carefully analyzed what exactly had happened since the attack. This is why the website was down for so long.

Most of the services (wiki, blogs, tutorials) on renoise.com are still offline. They will be brought back online, one by one. We are taking this opportunity to evaluate and fortify every nook and cranny of the website. We are temporarily replacing the website with a static HTML-only version as we work on the server in the background. We are sorry for the inconvenience and hope to to reanimate the renoise community portal as quickly and safely as possible.

We’ve already closed the vulnerability which made the attack possible. We will do everything humanly possible to avoid such incidents in the future.

What has happened:

After extensive detective work, it looks like an automated attack focused on harvesting email addresses. We have to assume that the attack did not specifically target Renoise as a product, but rather that its intent was to acquire a list of validated email addresses every community site is bound to have.

Renoise Backstage, a separate section of the site where we handle the Renoise User Accounts, did NOT get hacked. Therefore, the registered Renoise user accounts are safe. However, some accounts from before 2005 were stored in an obsolete database and were not fully migrated to Renoise Backstage. Those accounts were exposed, but have now been secured and closed. We will be contacting the affected users via email and will work with them to restore those accounts.

We do not store credit card numbers. The payment process is handled by our shop partner (SWReg). Even if the attackers would have been looking for that kind of data, they wouldn’t have found any traces of such data on our servers.

The forum database was the target of the attack. Please note that this does NOT mean that anyone has access to your emails or forum account. We are a victim of a typical website hack, the biggest point of interest was to harvest email addresses for spammers and their botnet. For good measure, you should reset your forum passwords immediately.

Again we are very sorry for the inconvenience and the down time. Fortunately we reacted quickly enough to avoid a much worse scenario.

If you have any questions, apprehensions, or other thoughts about what has happened, then please let’s discuss it publicly in the Server Crash forum or contact us privately.

Thank you for your understanding and continued support.

The Renoise Team

UPDATE You may have missed your chance to witness it live, but fortunately it has been recorded: Remixta First Time Live – Episode 6.

We just received this last minute announcement from everyone’s favorite Estonian radio host, DJ Suva:

“Yeah, that’s right. This time I am going to broadcast the recording of the show itself over Shoutcast. To listen you need, winamp, iTunes, rhythmbox, or any other music player capable of playing shoutcast stream with AAC+ encoding.

The link to tune in will be posted in this forum and Renoise IRC shortly before the broadcast will begin at exactly 16:00 GMT.

The recorded show will be uploaded to remixta.net later in 192kbps mp3 format.

You can all join in for fun and chat on Renoise IRC during the show. You can still recommend me the songs you want to be played before the show in this thread or with PM. You can also request songs during the show, but don’t expect all the requests to be fulfilled.

So be prepared!”

Remixta is a radio show featuring music exclusively made by Renoise users. To get into the mood, check out the previous shows here: http://www.remixta.net/.

Just in time for a new decade, Renoise 2.5 BETA is here.

New features

• Pattern Matrix: A birds eye view and editor of the song
• Cross Track Routing for “Meta Devices” and new devices like the “Signal Follower”, which allows you to sidechain other tracks parameters
• Plugin Grabber: Render Plugin Instruments to Renoise Instruments, Samples
• Vastly Improved MIDI Mapping
• A Bunch of New Internal Effects
• And much more…

A detailed description of the new features can be found at the Renoise 2.5 launch page.

Download

Beta versions are exclusive to registered users. If you are a registered user, you can get the beta from the Renoise Backstage.

Pricing and Availability

The first public 2.5 versions will be release candidates. The final version is expected to be released at the beginning of next year.

The price of Renoise will change from 49 Euro to 59 Euro when the final version is released. Everyone that buys Renoise 2.5 before the final version will get Renoise for the old price of 49 Euro. This covers upgrades up until and including version 3.5.

Those who registered Renoise before version 1.5, can update their license in the backstage. The price for a full versions upgrade is 39 EUR.

More information can be found at the Renoise Order page.

With the help of Achenar (i.e. Earthen Records), we’ve produced a new video for beginners. Check out the Renoise Homepage to watch it. Me personally? I’m a fan of the thick Scottish accent. There’s even a Japanese (日本語) version on YouTube (click the triangular button in the bottom right corner, and turn ON the captions). Pass it on.

The results of the Efficient Music Compo have been calculated and the winner was announced in a live internet radio show. For those who missed it, you can download it now: Efficient Music Compo Show [50MB].

Check out the complete list of Efficient Music Compo Results.

Peter Kirn from CDM has posted a summary of the compo and picked a winner for the Renoise license. Read the full story here: Tracker Tracks: Winners of the Efficient Music Competition Span Genres, Moods.

The The Efficient Music Competition is almost over and we want YOU to vote. The submitted songs combine awesomeness with low CPU usage which is exactly what we are looking for. All that remains is picking the winning song. Vote now – the voting booths are closing this Sunday.

We will conclude the Efficient Music Competition with an internet radio show hosted by MC Ron from Indamixx. He is going to broadcast a selection of the songs in record chart style. The show starts with the low tiers and moves up to the number one. The winner of the competition gets the Indamixx Netbook. The radio station will be at http://www.indamixx.com/indamixx-radio.html under channel “Renoise Competition”. Stay tuned for the exact broadcast time.

Note that the competitions songs are also excellent learning material. Just in case you’re looking for examples in the form of self-contained Renoise XRNS songs that don’t rely on VSTs… Well, here they are.

The “optimize your song like hell” aka Renoise/Indamixx/CDM compo has a new name; The Efficient Music Competition. We have just opened a new mini-site on renoise.com, where you can upload and download songs, discuss optimization techniques and vote for competition entries – in a special kind of way.

Together with the new website and new name, we have a new deadline as well: October 25th.

The Efficient Music Competition mini-site

The goal of the competition remains the same. You have to write a song in Renoise that is efficient enough to run on a netbook. One would think that’s not too hard, considering trackers have been around since man made fire and PCs had the brainpower of a cobblestone. It appears we have been spoiled with high quality effects nowadays, turning the concept into a worthy challenge.