Eventually I will learn to be better organized when creating Renoise songs.
In the meantime I have a number of songs with numerous tracks, groups, instruments, send tracks, and samples, with no easy way to see how each is used.
Some songs go through lengthy evolution and before long I’ve a a few too many send tracks and instruments and such.
I know there are tools for deleting unused samples and instruments. What I’d like is a way to get a song report. Something that lists useful info about tracks and such.
I started writing some Ruby code to grab the Song.xml from an xrns file and extract certain info.
At the moment I’m most interested in finding what sequencetracks go to what send tracks; tracking down unused send tracks; finding muted or empty sequence tracks. Long-term I’d like to know when, for example, a sample is used only once or twice, or if I have duplicate instruments, or if a sample or instrument is only used in a muted pattern. Such info would make it easier to go clean out cruft.
Before I get to carried away I wanted to know if something like this already exists. Or if I’m oblivious to existing ways to easily find such details (i.e., is there a way to select a send track and quickly see what sequence tracks use it? Or if a send track is never used?)
Before I get to carried away I wanted to know if something like this already exists. Or if I’m oblivious to existing ways to easily find such details (i.e., is there a way to select a send track and quickly see what sequence tracks use it? Or if a send track is never used?)
To this point, my tool “Go To Send Track” will list all the tracks pointing to it via the right click menu. i.e. select a send track, right-click on the DSP lane and you see the info in the menu. You can navigate to the tracks by clicking on the menu entries too.
Song Report Tool. Hm, should simple to make, but you’d have to watch out or it could become quite the monster!
I wouldn’t parse the raw XML for this though, it is a lot more straightforward to use API features here.
Except I’ve started this as a commandline tool, using Ruby. I wasn’t concerned about parsing XML until I started looking at how tracks notes are stored. That got me reconsidering whether doing it in Lua as a Renoise tool might be less work in the long run.
Also, don’t forget the vTable (part of vLib). Should be especially useful in a “report” context.
This would be handy for displaying smallish amounts of detail. I think I’d prefer a text file to store larger amounts of detail (names of samples, where they are used, how often).
Faced with the prospect of parsing the Song.xml in order to get TrackPattern info I decided I would have fewer headaches just making this a Renoise tool.
I’ve run into some issues in extracting data, but I’l post those questions as separate topics.
