Linking instruments instead of embedding?

Ideas & suggestions
1

Hello!

I’ve been using Renoise for about a year, perhaps, now, and it’s going really well - really liking it a lot.

I have a quick question - I have a VST that was converted to a XRNI pack (the VSCO2 orchestral suite), and while it sounds great, adding the UprightPiano instrument makes Renoise take longer to save the song because it has to package a large number of sample files in with the song. Is it possible to link to the samples on disk, instead, much like a VST?

That way, Renoise wouldn’t have to package the samples inside the song file and saving wouldn’t take so long (though loading wouldn’t be impacted by this, of course).

2

what you ask for is possible using an external (vsti) sampler.
unfortunately not possible with renoise in its current state.

the advantage is of course that you’re not creating unnecessary dependencies and that xrns files still function properly, even though your file system structure has changed or the song file has been carried over to another machine / person.

3

Yeah, that’s true; that is a big advantage. It still would be nice to have the option, though; thanks, anyway, for letting me know!

4

You can do a trick, but you must be aware of it:

  1. Before saving the song, save the Instrument X in XRNI native format from the instrument box.
  2. In the instrument box use the “clear” option (not “delete”) and clean the instrument. This will not remove the notes from the pattern editor.
  3. Rename the cleaned instrument.
  4. Save the song in a new version.

This way, you can save the song and the instrument separately. It is possible to have different versions of the same song. When you load the desired version song, reload Instrument X into the renamed instrument slot.

It’s not an ideal solution, but at least it won’t swallow up as much hard drive space if you have multiple versions of the same song.

You can do this with several instruments, as long as you classify the instruments well.

5

Do note that redistributing the samples (because you converted the instrument to XRNI) is typically a copyright violation and covered by the license you agreed to when you got your copy of the instrument. I don’t have any Versilian products, but I’d be very surprised if their license allows you to perform XRNI (or any other sample pack) conversion.

6

@Raul - Hmm, interesting. Roundabout, but that does sound like it would work. Thanks for the tip!

@Pomax - The samples are linked directly on Versilian’s website, so I should be fine. Thanks for looking out, though~

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