[This tip is for beginners who want to improve their workflow.]
If you, like me, have hundreds of .xrns song files that take a long time to load in Renoise because they contain so many samples and VST instruments/effects, and you want to preview the song before you decide to load it – then what do you do?
One fast and simple method is to use Renoise’s own “Render Selection To Sample” feature. Here’s how I do it:
- When you’re working on a song and are just about to save it and quit Renoise, select some portion of the song that you feel is representive for it (such as your latest pattern).
- Use the “Render Selection To Sample” feature
- Drag the rendered sample to the first instrument slot, and rename it to something like “Preview song”
- Save the song
Now, next time you browse around your folders, wading through the hundreds of .xrns song files that contain just a couple of patterns (yes, this is very common situation for many tracker composers…), you first ‘enable previewing of samples when clicking on them’ (the little triangular speaker icon) and then – before you load the song – you click on the little [+] symbol to the left and then click once on the first sample.
Your song is now being previewed. Done!
(If you want to create a preview that contains multiple moments of the song material, just render multiple selection to samples and place them out at the first instrument slots. Or, if you want it more complex, then create a temporary pattern where you place out the rendered samples after each other. Then render all this to a new sample and delete the others. You might also consider pitching the samples up a bit so that they play at a higher speed, to save some previewing time and song file bytes… but that might be a bit overkill.)
