Is there a way to stop Renoise from saving every sample in the song?

I feel like Renoise’s default ‘save’ behavior in my song sessions is creating a lot of redundant sample content on my hard drive.

I totally understand why it’s smart to have all used samples in a song saved with the song, sure: you can easily share it, move it, etc. and everything is always there.

However, if I’m not needing to share or move my songs, and I tend to use certain (renoise) instruments I’ve built across multiple songs, this means every song is storing all the files for those instruments – which could mean dozens of redundant copies of samples piling up on my HD within all those songs.

For example, I like to build big drum kits. So I have renoise instruments such as “industrial drum kit A” and it could easily contain 60+ samples in it.

Every song I use “industrial drum kit A” in, saves those same 60 samples with the song. If I have ten songs using that kit, I’ve created ten duplicate copies of those 60+ samples!

Is there any way around this? Any way to have the songs simply read the Samples from the Instrument (as saved in my user library) and not copy all that over to the song session as well?

Obviously my concern here is just wasted disk space.

Would be interested in any thoughts on this form the devs, and other users. Thanks!

-Michael

It’s the most reliable method , instead of poiting to dir’s …

Once you start to migrate all your renoise projecs to a new computer , you’ll appreciate the self contained xrns .

Let’s not change that .

One approach to your problem , use a lesser H.Q. sample kit ( 8/16 bit ) while saving the song …and replace it with higher Q. when rendering.

Second approach , create a few google accounts , 8gig free data storage .

I created 3 accounts to back up all my reaktor ensembles/ some renoise stuff

It’s the most reliable method , instead of poiting to dir’s …

Once you start to migrate all your renoise projecs to a new computer , you’ll appreciate the self contained xrns .

Let’s not change that .

One approach to your problem , use a lesser H.Q. sample kit ( 8/16 bit ) while saving the song …and replace it with higher Q. when rendering.

Second approach , create a few google accounts , 8gig free data storage .

I created 3 accounts to back up all my reaktor ensembles/ some renoise stuff

Like I said in my OP, I totally understand the logic behind it, but I prefer to have these things as options, so that I can manage my disk space more efficiently. Live, for example, will only save the samples with the song when you do a “Collect All and Save,” so as long as you do that before sharing / migrating, you’ll have everything you need, but prior to that, you won’t be saving a ton of redundant samples in every song file.

I appreciate the help, but sorry, the proposed solution of using “lesser quality sample kits” is just not workable, that would require so much re-rendering of files and rebuilding of kits there’s just no way it would be worth it for the space saved. I already have zillions of Renoise instruments in my user library, I’m not about to go re-render all of them at a lower bit depth, ugh.

As for google accounts, sure, I can look into other storage methods; I actually have plenty of space, it’s just that, to my way of thinking, using up space saving all the same samples from a drum kit or multi-sampled instrument over and over again among songs is just simply inefficient.

cheers,

-M

As of today, there’s no native way to share samples between .xrni or .xrns. It’s a design decision to keep everything self-contained. If you stick to native effects and instruments, you can give the .xrns file to anyone and they can play it.

This has come up as a feature request multiple times. For now, your only option is to use a third-party sampler that references sample files on disk. Of course then you lose the native .xrni functionality… just gotta decide what’s more important to you on a case-by-case basis.

Ok, thanks for the info.

And just a heads up, it’s a little frustrating that each person here answers with a repetition of what I already know, e.g. “you can give the .xrns file to anyone and they can play it.” Yeah, as I said in my OP and in my follow-up post here, I get that, I know WHY it’s this way, I’m just looking for a way around it, which apparently there isn’t – good to know.

When you weigh the convenience of self-contained sessions with the massive amounts of disk space this eats up on my system (I build a TON of .xrni instruments that include lots of samples and use them across many songs, so every song contains duplicate samples for the same instruments) for me, I’d prefer to save the disk space and worry about the convenience of sharing / migrating when it actually comes time to do so.

As I already pointed out, in Ableton this is as simple as a file-menu option: “Collect All and Save,” an action which, if performed, will do exactly what Renoise is doing by default.

The key here is that you can do it whenever you want. You guys act like “but if it doesn’t save the samples with the song, we’ll never have them when we want to share our songs or migrate to a new system, and panic will rule the world, and everything good will die!!” Uh, no. All you need we need is an Option to “collect all and save” so that, when necessary, you can consolidate all your files into the song. Easy.

Renoise’s logic is: we will assume you’d never think to do this if we gave you an option to, and thereby force this behavior in all cases, resulting in massive amounts of duplicate copies of sample content that will, for people with extensive, frequently-used instruments in their library, result in an enormous amount of redundant content / HD disk space wasted.

But now I’m repeating myself over and over.

It just is what it is.

-M

Plus one to that, it should be an option.

I understand that the heritage of trackers is sharing song files , but Renoise is not your typical tracker