The subject line got cut off, it read in full – “I’d like to be able to save multiple versions of my song, sharing all assets (samples)”
When working on a song, I prefer to save incremental / chronological copies of the work, so that I can “revert” to early saved versions if necessary, or create drastic off-shoot versions without overwriting the “original” version, etc.
Doing this in Renoise, however, results in the saving of a lot of redundant file content, because any saved .rns file saves all the samples used in the song.
Meaning that (as I’m sure most of you already know)
-
Save “My Song Version 1” — and all of its samples get saved in the file.
-
Save “My Song Version 2” – all those samples get saved again, separately, into the new .rns file. So on my HD, we just duplicated all of the drum samples, instruments, other samples, whatever, and really for no good reason, eating up disk space…
I’d like to see some kind of functionality where I can either 1) save ‘versions’ of a song that all access the same assets (the samples), so as to avoid all the redundant saving of samples that goes on above, or 2) an approach like Ableton, where a Project folder is created automatically when you start a new song, and it includes a folder for all the sample content, and then any other song session created inside the same Project Folder just grabs those assets from the same single folder of sample content, unless specifically told not (e.g. like with a “collect all and save” to a new location, etc).
The point here, in summary, is to allow progressive saving of new versions of my song without it saving the same samples over and over again, wasting disk space, since each version of the song is accessing what should / could be the exact same set of samples (understanding that newer versions may likely access additional, newer samples that aren’t in the earlier versions, but still, they could all be stored in one unified location).
-M