How To Encode Your Samples In A Song To Ogg

Tips & Tricks
1

this may either sound obvious or not to you all, depending on how much you are familiar to OGG encoding and ZIP handling.

Since version 1.8, Renoise can load OGG samples. This mean you can release your big songs to the public by preventively encoding all samples to OGG, thus saving up to more than 90% of filesize.
For example, my song “Breath” is 35,413KB un compressed, and 1,592KB with samples compressed to about 100Kbps.

So what to do?

First of all, you need an OGG encoder:
I suggest you to use oggdropXPd (freeware), which lets you encode files by simply dragging them on its little window.

Now you need to get the sample files from the XRNS file:
for this task, WinRAR (shareware) is excellent, but any other ZIP utility is good enough. Simply open the XRNS file with this program, and extract the SampleData folder somewhere.

Now you have to:

  • drop SampleData subfolders contents (.WAV) on oggdropXPd so you will get the corresponding .OGG files from it on the same folder where WAV files are
  • delete the SampleData folder in the XRNS archive
  • remove WAV files from the uncompressed SampleData subfolder
  • add the uncompressed SampleData folder to the XRNS file
  • you have done it!

It really just needs seconds to be done so, if your song has not VST instruments, please follow these simple steps and share your music with us!

be careful!
OGG format is a lossy format! This means that the sound will loose quality when the WAV file is saved to OGG format. So be sure to backup your song before releasing it as OGGed-XRNS! If you need to save space on your HD while composing, use FLAC format. You will save less space, but you will not loose quality when saving the song

EDIT:
added some more info based on the comments below

2

brilliant post. Thanks. :)

3

Blam!!

Nice work mate. Not surprised this got pinned.

So .ogg is completely lossless then? I am guessing it is. I should just google the answer eh…

Good post

4

no, OGG is lossy, but at lower bitrate (such as 100Kbps) is way better than MP3

5

If you want lossless you can also apply FLAC encoding.
And this does not require an extgernal encoder.

6

It would be nice, if Renoise would support saving OGG encoded versions directly.

7

Not everyone knows that Ogg is lossy. If we would support this in an easy way, some might use it too often and degrade their samples again and again when loading/saving the songs again and again.

8

Than maybe support it ina bit harder way? Such as “Export for web” option or something like that.

9

Exactly what I was just thinking. People are used to using/seeing that kind of terminology in other populars apps such as Photoshop. I think a “save for web” option with a very clear message box explaining that the samples will be compressed in a lossy format, etc., would be more than enough.

10

Agreed, in the current selection box this wouldn’t work, also because the samples would be reencoded each time the song will be saved and degrade over time even more. This might be great helper for swapping songs back and forth when doing collabs for example.

11

Also, I’m wodnering if Renoise could memorize if the samples were altered during a session and would just copy them from the opened file during saving, instead of reencoding them. This would probably make saving faster, no matter which file format was chosen. Also, it would allow modifying ogg-encoded songs without loss of sample quality.