ok i think Renoise is missing something rather important…
On quite a number of occasions now ive started a new song, worked on it for a while and got something decent going…
BUT!! Renoise will crash for whatever reason , VSTi malfunction or something and i lose all my hard work !!!
Now , can somebody explain why when you start a new song , it isnt called ‘untitled.xrns’ or something similar ‘song1.xrns’ or anything ! just as long as it has a filename ! (im pretty sure this was featured in an older version?!) therefore AutoSave will work and save your song EVEN if you havent bothered to call it something in the Diskop
If you forget to name your song and it crashes you have no way of retrieving it because AutoSave will only work if you song has a finename ?!?!?!?!?!?!
Please consider this as a useful and loss-preventing tool for all hardworking Renoisers out there !!!
If renoise would save “untitled” automatically, which of the two choices would you prefer?:
-1 ) to let it automatically overwrite the existing “Untitled” that it autobackupped a previous time with another song?
-2 ) to pop up this ever nagging dialog to force you to either overwrite or rename the previous song having the same name?
There will always be responsibilities to take, whether it is when you start the song or the autobackup saving would be automated as soon as you have named your song.
Also, Renoise has a crash-backup feature that makes an attempt to salvage what it still can if Renoise can handle the crash appropiately.
If you have experienced crashes many times, i figure that you can already make your life a lot easier by simply adjusting your workflow a little and make it a priority to save each song at start before you even touch anything else in Renoise.
( and try to figure out which VST plugins are causing the crashes and avoid using those)
yes I would prefer to have it overwrite a song previously backed up as ‘untitled.xrns’ than not at all !!!
seeing as i start a new song nearly everyday I dont need a lecture about taking responsibilities when it comes to starting a new song , sometimes it just slips the mind !!!
at least it would give me the opportunity to retrieve something which will never be created again !!
im sure this isnt a hard feature to integrate ?? ‘_Untitled.xrns’ could just be defaulted to a new track !?
Lerchiosi is right. It wont hurt if we save untitled backups as well, if that makes things (songs) a bit more safe. Even if its not Renoise (our) fault. This is software, and software can and will always crash. The crashbackup will work in 99.9 percent of the cases but the 00.1 percent still hurt.
Let me try to add this for the next release.
Also, while we are at this: The backups need there own “something is modified” flags. Currently if an autobackup gets saved, it will save/update itself over and over again until you save the song manually. What should happen instead, is that the autobackups only get saved when something changed since the last autobackup (not the regular save) was done. I hope I haven’t confused you all - this is hard to explain…
You should also consider the size, some files might need. Imagine someone who likes to play around with a lot of samples without actually saving her/his experiments. This poor girl/guy would have a lot of huge autosave_001.xrns, autosace_002.xrns etc lying around.
I know, switching off or changing the autosave behavior would solve such a problem, I am just thinking about possible problems. ^^
well i discovered the crash backups folder and it is empty ?!! Renoise has crashed on me 3 times in the last week losing 3 part-made songs , this is more than likely buggy VST(i)'s that i use because im assuming Renoise will only write a crash-backup if its actually the Renoise code that crashes?? (correct me if im wrong)
If a Vst(i) crashes i just get pc-freeze and have to close running programs manually!
Yes please Taktik , if a song was simply file-name defaulted to ‘untitled.xrns’ or maybe ‘untitledxxxx.xrns’ counting up in increments possibly in an ‘untitled’ folder to save clogging up Renoise Songs folder, I would be very happy
Also have no idea what VST(i)'s are crashing, seems to be random and sporadic !? from what i can remember its a combination of playing certain instruments in chords whilst flicking thru my VSTI’s list and changing the base-note can sometimes cause a crash!!
No in simple language you just say:
Renoise will have to detect if user changed something in the song when it wants to make an autobackup.
If something has changed → Save backup song. If nothing has changed, then don’t save (and don’t get quircky clicks and pauses during songplay)
This would probably require “project” file types (.xrnp format which stores all data unpacked in a designated sub-folder). It would then allow to save only changes made in specific areas:Only made changes in the patterns?->Save song.xml. Also made changes in the instrument area? Save instruments and song.xml
Only made changes on certain samples? Save samples.
Also only save that particular data that has been changed. Don’t save all instruments if only two were swapped. (actually if two instruments were swapped:Save song.xml!
However this costs probably a lot of time to make this and probably has to relate to the undo buffer (to see what has changed where)
Renoise crashing out randomly can also be a hardware problem.
Specially if song X does not contain any exact VST plugin that song Y contains but Renoise crashes on both songs. This is a good signal you might have a driver or hardware problem.
