Evening…
I have been reading a lot of the stuff on this board about .xrns and .xml and it all sounds very impressive, but I don’t really understand it…
Obviously I know that .xrns is a song file format for Renoise and .xml is a programming language, but how can I use this in Renoise?
This is a very N00B question, so I apologize. If anyone can give the absolute basics and tell me how I can use this to my advantage, I will be very grateful!
Thanks
xml isn’t a programming language, more a way of describing something. Add the extension .zip to an .xrns file, unpack that and have a look at song.xml. That’s better than any explanation or summary I think… it’s more or less plain english with a lot of nesting.
As for what to use it for… no idea.
Rename song.xrns to song.zip, unzip it, and look at the contents. Your file will be Song.XML in the root, then folders and sounds. The Song.xml file can be opened in a text editor like Notepad (sucks), vi, emacs, nano, Context, or my personal choice Jedit, etc. Here’s a screenshot of the Song.xml from one of my files:
Jedit, above, has a Structure Browser Plug-In (rightside). XML a way to represent data in a structured format that is human readable. Like Johan said, it’s NOT a programming language.
Most contemporary programming languages have libraries that can manipulate XML data very easily. If not, at least it’s text. Previous versions of Renoise outputed binary files which requires you to hack the spec and read bytes using more hardcore assembly style programing methodologies.
With XML, anyone who knows how to code can just look at the XML and pretty much figure out how a Renoise song works. They can manipulate the data very easily and this opens the door for a lot of possibilities. Now, all us coders have to do is get off our asses and actually do something.
Beatslaughter got the ball rolling with his Listvst app. This app drills down the tree and look at and nodes, then consolidates the data comparing it with your HD and outputting it in a statistically meaningful way. It’s pretty cool! Too bad it’s windows only.
Good times.