A public demo of Renoise is now available for Linux. I love this tracker, especially for beat slicing madness, and I’m very excited to see a Linux release. It’s something like 50 euros to buy the full version.

Now, hopefully I can get it running on my Eee, and not run into the kind of issues I had with window size while working with wesnoth.

I’ll let ya’ll know how it goes.

UPDATE: So, as it turns out it the minimum window size for renoise is 990 x 700, which presents a slight problem on my 800×480 Eee PC…

So aside from being rather cramped on my tiny new toy, we are still looking at a fully functional tracker for Linux. We’re talking ALSA and JACK support for MIDI and sound routing excellence, aswell as support for both LADSPA plugins and native Linux VSTs(link to renoise forum listing currently functional ones, also check out jucetice). So, overall I suggest you pick this thing up and go play around with it since you can finally enjoy it’s /massive greatness/ under Linux. Actually if you’ve never used it you should give it a try no matter what OS you’ve got running, you may come to love it’s unique approche to music making, especially if you’re a techie and a musician.

Aside from Linux, there’s been a variety of additions and and bug fixes in the 1.9.1 release, including a great “Draw Mode” in the sample editor that you can use to quickly edit out pops and clicks in your samples (or however you want to change them), as well as the ability to create new samples on the fly by drawing thier waveforms.

There are a few bugs lingering in the Linux version, but it mostly seems to be with multichannel sound cards and ALSA. Also there are a few things I’d like to see added, namely DSSI support for native Linux synths, better integration with the Jack transport, and the ability to load mp3s. Then again this is just a beta.

Overall I give this a rating of awesome sauce or, if you perfer, sawesome.