Soundtrackers are cool. They let musicians create music in a style reminiscent of the way assembler programmers write code. Notes become numbers and timing becomes a position in a list. Renoise is a proprietary sound tracker for Windows, OS X and Linux with a mostly functional demo version. But does it live up to the memory of OctaMED? Read on...

The main limitation of the demo is that you can't render your compositions to WAV files, which would enable straightforward CD burning, or encoding to another format. On the carrot side of the deal, registered Renoise users get a library of samples thrown in, as well as voting rights on new features and early access to development versions.

Renoise 2.0.0 is delivered as a tarball, with both installation and run-immediately binaries provided. There's also a 36-page getting started guide included as a PDF, which is more than comprehensive enough for the beginner. As proprietary music applications go, the €49 (plus VAT) registration fee is very reasonable. This fee includes software updates until the next major version, and the ability to download releases for all three supported platforms as many times as you need to.

Read More: http://www.tuxradar.com/content/renoise-20