Importing Samples From Modules

If Renoise is already capable of opening *.it/xm/s3m/mod etc, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to load samples directly from inside of those modules, with the original loops, etc?
For many years and I’ve been taking interesting sounds from them.
Would be interesting to read your input about that.

in case you don’t know, you can already do this with RNS and XRNS files: click on the “[+]” sign on the left of their names in the Disk Browser.

this is not supported for other kind of modules.

Thanks,
sure, I know it’s possible for .xrns/rns but when the tracker supports older formats (it loads and plays the files no?) it should be relatively easy to implement the option to import samples directly from those older format modules, correct me if I’m wrong?

i totally agree… i have 10 years of impulse tracker files and i would love to browse their samples!!

I can t open the .rns … i can only open .XRNS to browse

yes sorry, my fault: this is only implemented for XRNS, not for RNS.

regarding other module formats: this is not implemented probably because it would require parsing the entire file in order to get the required info, which can be slow.

XRNS format is XML based, so doing this is faster and easier.

But it might be easily possible, just not yet implemented - perhaps the developers can share an opinion?
It-Alien, sounds to me by the “sound” of your replies that you wouldn’t like to have such a feature, I wonder why… :P

well, a feature like this could be handy.

personally, I still have my old RAW/WAV/IFF/XI collection and the new WAV/RNI/XRNI so, when I need a sample, I just go there and pick it, I don’t feel the need for browsing through old modules.

that said, I can tell you that the developing concept of Renoise is going far away from the old way of tracking, keeping the goods of old, but caring nothing about supporting the old formats.

Renoise can load XI files, and this should be fine enough.

I understand your point of view of a former tracker user who is in the middle of a river, but I strongly suggest you to look ahead.

Supporting a dead format such as XM or IT up to that point is not where Renoise is aiming now.

I hope you won’t take my words as a lack of interest towards users like you; on the contrary, we team members hope you will get completely comfortable with Renoise regardless of your FT2/IT2 heritage.

developing resources (time, people) are not big, so they have to be spent in looking ahead, and hopefully Renoise instrument format will turn into something which will make comparison with XI almost senseless in the near future.

Well, I do see the logic in your opinion, there are probably much more important features in development right now.
It’s just a thought I had, still it would be nice to have this but I’ll manage to live also without it. :P
I’ve been using Logic for the last 6 years atleast, I hope I don’t give the impression of “that old tracker fella” :lol:

Whoa whoa, slow down… “dead”? I think the word you were looking for is stable. It’s definately not dead in terms of interest, available editors/players and sheer amount of modules (and musical genius, I might add). Especially with Milkytracker etc. I wouldn’t dismiss it like that… think portables! Sketch a little melody while on the bus, load it into renoise at home and superbify it?


Double clicking a module to simply load all samples into consecutive samples slots would be nice and maybe not that much work, but other than that I personally don’t really extract samples from modules either so I don’t care. Just don’t call XM “dead” please… and long live the SID, too! Hah :P

Import/export plugin api would solve any issues like this… extracting samples from modules would simply be another archive handler, besides zip. Hmm, people could write importers/rippers for all sorts of formats…

If we shall be 100% correct here, it is not faster and easier just because it is XML-based but because the samples is not embedded in the song file (which is an XML-file). If the samples would have been embedded in the XML-file it would have been as hard even for the XRNS-files, but to have them embedded in the file do not necessarily mean that it would be very hard, it all depends on the structure of the file and how the file address the samples.

Stable is a pretty wicked word to use for a file-format ;) Can a file format even be stable? I do not think so. The implementation that is making use of the format can be stable, but the format on its own can not be stable. The right words for the XM-format would probably rather be old and primitive, and I think it is great that Renoise already today can import such modules, but to be honest I do not think that to much work shall be put on supporting such old formats (such as .xm, .it, .mod, .s3m etc) rather than to put time on developing new nice features in Renoise, an earlier suggested loading and saving API would for example solve this problem in a much more generic way than to pinpoint on specific formats, then 3rd party developers easy could develop loaders and savers for any format rather than the main developers shall have to put time in things like this ;)

Yeah well good point, it’s certainly not stable as in “perfect”, but as in “will definately not change anymore”.

Exactly, just like ASCII for example: still very useful sometimes.

I completely agree heh… but regarding this topic: Renoise can already read the samples from a module when loading a module, so if that can be expanded to sample import by some refactoring “along the way”, that wouldn’t necessarily mean coding a new feature. Of course it’s silly for us to debate how much time a feature would take to implement, but that is somewhat separate from wether a feature would be good to have - not to halt all other things and implement it right away, but to keep somewhere in the back of the mind - and it would be great to be able to discuss such small things in peace without somebody going “the sky is falling” all the time… the developers are WAY more interested in not wasting their time on silly gimmicks than any of us ever could be, so chill and have some faith :P

Uhm, yeah… notice the last paragraph of my post above :rolleyes:

Woops ;) Missed that sentence ;) sorry
Here you can find an old suggestion I made a while ago…