A way to use the same (rather large, sampled) instruments in multiple modules

Ideas & suggestions
#1

…without each module containing its own entire copy of these instruments and all their samples. ie, the xrns would simply refer to the files on disk instead.

Another approach is to “combine” several songs into one module, but that becomes pretty cumbersome for orderlist arrangements and rendering to wav output + remembering where everything is. Currently it’s either that, or a huge waste of disk space when each xrns file could easily be under a megabyte.

(before anyone answers “buy a bigger hdd” i’ll say it right away: i don’t use windows and i don’t adhere to microsoft mentality at all)

1 Like
#2

This is an oft-discussed topic here; search the forums to find other threads.

I agree it’s a bit goofy for every song using a sample-based piano xrni to hold it’s own copy of the flac files. OTOH it makes it stupid easy to share xrns files (e.g, when I work on different machines).

BTW, pretty sure people on macs or those using *nix often see value in migrating to larger drives. : )

Whether or not the system allows for such expansion is another matter.

#3

Hey =) sorry for the delayed reply, been busy and haven’t checked on here lately.

Thanks for pointing me to the right thread. I vaguely remember this being discussed 5 or 6 years ago, but i really wasn’t sure what keyworsd to search for other than “xrns” …indeed making the sample based instruments external does break the independent and self-contained nature of your modules, but it’s not very different from relying on a VST or other type of plugin, except samples aren’t limited by platform while many VST’s are.

Yeah of course it’s better to have more disk space vs less. That’s exactly why i prefer to not waste tons of it with hundreds of copies of the same drum samples, which is a very inefficient and microsoft-like approach imho =)

#4

i would like to add that option for saving without collecting all samples would be awesome, because sometimes when i press ctrl+s to save project file (xrns) which contains a lot of samples - or at least one huge multi-sampled drum kit, i have to wait like 10 secs project to be saved, and i do this quite often, like after every 4-5 steps of change, so it consumes like more than 50% of the time invested in the project (song creation).

#5

I don’t think that keeping sample data inside the song is a bad idea. Most DAWs do that, and you then can easily copy the song over.

There seems to be another reason that Renoise saves and re-encodes all samples on first import and keep it in place: So Renoise can edit the sample, non destructively. Other daws simply save WAVs.

Still I find it outdated (yes I remember you gave me a good explaination for this, what was it :laughing: ) that the whole song including samples will be zipped. It should be such a hidden resource folder instead, only zipping the song xml, and keeping the samples directly accessible. It would obviously speedup renoise on song save, plus make the a lot more easy to manage the used samples from outside (maybe even adding it to Sononym etc). At least on macos such “resource” folder acts just like a file in the filesystem, and maybe Windows has such a mechanism, too?

For sake of performance while undoing sample edits, maybe even flac encoding of the samples should be dropped. It is not saving so much space anyway. Save it simply as WAV 32bit.

In the end, I think it is better, if there wasn’t added just again another option, making Renoise more complicated, but instead using a clever automatism.

#6

I was just wondering: The XRNS file is a zip file, but is it compressed? And if so, wouldn’t it be an option to give the user the choice of compression strength (or of not compressing the zip at all)? I would assume that a zip file that is not compressed can easily (and faster) be written to, than a compressed one.

One could then choose no compression for the XRNS file when working on it, and then when sharing it, one could save it with compression.

This would not solve the issue songs being always self-contained though. Unless…you would use hard links to the samples…mmh…

#7

Simple workaround, no idea how i didn’t think of this before, seems to work great so far.

The samples are in .sf2 files, and i use a VST called CarlaRack (Linux) to load them, the VST param block just references the .sf2 files on disk, so they don’t get saved with the .xrns - i’m pretty certain similar plugins exist for mac/windowz that would allow similar functionality.

#8

I do a similar workaround, but it would be great to have this native - my use case - being able to have aliases for Instruments (not just VST/AU).

Re-use same instrument across different tracks without having to duplicate everything, well, the raw sample data mainly.

Or make instruments multitimbral and use aliases and midi channels, then the data is in one place. Sort of a compromise