Renoise songs (XRNS), Instruments (XRNI) and DSP device-chains (XRNT) are pkzip containers with non “.zip” extension, to avoid that people who don’t want to know about the internals can simply handle the files as binary files, and of course to shrink the file size on the Disk.
To access or modify the XML and/or SampleData (for XRNI and XRNS) content, you can simply open the files with a zip decompression tool like WinRar, WinZip or Stuffit Deluxe. Alternatively you can of course also directly uncompress them via a shell tool which supports pkzips (like “unzip”).
When compressing a new XRNS,I,T archive, make sure that you do NOT wrap the content into another folder in the zip. So do not zip a folder which contains the XML and SampleData folder but zip them directly. The SampleData folder and XML file must be in the root of the container!
About the SampleData content:
Samples can be stored in any audio format that Renoise can handle (open). So you can use WAV, AIF, OGG, FLAC or even MP3 or AAC samples. The demo songs are compressed by using OGG samples for example. Further the file extensions are not referenced in the XML file, so you can modify/convert the samples afterwards into any other format without having to update the XML.
Samples are identified by Renoise via its path and name:
For Songs for example, we have a file structure like:
Song.xml
SampleData
- InstrumentX (NAME)
- SampleY (NAME)
Where X will identify into which instrument the sample has to be loaded,
and Y into which sample slot (split). NAME (everything behind “InstrumentX” and “SampleY” is just cosmetics and is ignored).
For Instruments, you will have the sample structure and rules, but with InstrumentX as the SampleData root.
