evoke is in a month, and there will be another tinymusic-competition (hooray).
I know this is very late and maybe impossible to do … but still I would just like to ask if its possible to hack the possibility to save samples as 16bit into renoise 1.5 before evoke is going to happen. I dont care how nasty it will be, really. just for the possibility to use more kb for samples … please …
with next edition of Renoise this would probably be quite easy to do (you will be able to access WAV files directly into the RNS file); with version 1.52 I don’t think it is possible.
Use the OldSkool Force 
I don’t quite understand. You mean the internal sample format which Renoises uses when saving to .RNS? Or do you mean the actual DiskOP save sample function which saves to 32-bit .WAV?
Since you mentioned the tinymusic compo I’m assuming you mean the internal sample format, and that you’re concerned about Renoise wasting space by storing 32-bit samples (which were originally 16-bit) with the .RNS file.
This issue was brought up a while ago and I didn’t quite get it then either. In a test I just did a few moments ago, I made a new song in Renoise with no samples loaded and 1 pattern which was 64 steps in length. I saved the song to disk and it was 24576 bytes in size. I then loaded in a sample which was 44.1khz 16-bit mono and 655360 bytes in size, re-saved the song and checked the filesize once more. It was 679936 bytes in size.
24576 + 655360 = 679936
It appears that the sample got saved with the .RNS in exactly the same format it was originally, wasting no space whatsoever. Is there something obvious I’m missing?
If this is not what you meant then please ignore all of this 
Interestingly enough I just tried it with an 8-bit sample.
Blank .RNS size: 24576 bytes
Original 8-bit sample: 81920 bytes
.RNS with sample: 188416 bytes
188416 - 24576 = 163840
163840 / 2 = 81920
Looks like Renoise converted it to 16-bit and saved that with the .RNS in this instance. I could certainly see this being a problem if you were going to use a lot of 8-bit chip style samples to try and save precious space.
Hmm. The plot thickens.
.
I am currently away and dont have access to renoise, so can you do me a small favour ?
load a 16-bit or 8-bit sample, normalize/cut - or something like this - it and tell if it stays 16bit ? I mean that if you edit it, does it converted to 32bit or does it stay within 16 ?
because if then atleast I could be sure to squeeze some extra bytes by saving my samples, converting them to 16bit, reload them and then just leave them untouched when I save the song again.
I had the same feeling myself earlier when I was testing it. I loaded up my 16 bit sample and gave it a volume fade then normalised it. It seemed to stay the same as before, the .RNS filesize was identical.
well okay. I think this year I will go for even more “realtime synthesizing” and stick to using mostly wavetable-like samples. lets see. good thing is that the rns structure is well packable, last years entry was some 63k zipped and depacked to some 220kb because of all the pattern and automation data. hehe.