It would be very convenient if there was a setting to disable the packaging of samples in the project file, to load them from disk.
Why?
- Many DAWs use periodic project backups, and since samples in the uncompressed wav format are packed into VST Chunk, a project can weigh a lot if there are a lot of samples and Redux instances. And if such saves accumulate, the folder can very quickly begin to take up gigabytes. At the same time, the behavior as it is now is very convenient for transferring the project.
- The same instruments can be used in multiple projects. On the one hand, the current behavior is convenient, since instruments and samples are unique in each project, and changing one does not change all the others, but on the other hand, sometimes the opposite behavior is needed. Firstly, it can drastically reduce the disk space occupied by the instrument (for example when you use several huge instruments), and secondly, it allows you to replace samples in all projects at once. This behavior requires knowledge of what you are doing, so the default settings should be left as the current behavior.
Searching for samples
I propose to implement two sample search strategies: an absolute folder path and a relative path. Moreover, these settings must be written to the system configuration, not in the project itself.
Then a person can allocate a global folder for storing tools
Topics for discussion
- What to store separately, and what, nevertheless, in the project? On the one hand, you can load the entire instrument from disk, with all the samples and settings, but then when you change the instrument in one project, it will change in the others, which is not obvious. On the other hand, you can store only samples as separate wav files, while the rest of the parameters take up little space and are successfully saved to the project. But in this case, you need to think over the convenient organization of samples and search in subfolders in order to prevent a huge number of samples from all instruments in one folder at once, as this is very inconvenient.
Behavior
On saving
- If the settings specify the packaging of samples in the project, the current behavior remains.
- If the settings specify the loading of samples from the disk, the samples are copied to the specified folder, and a flag is added to the project that the samples must be searched on the disk.
On loading
- If the project does not have a flag that samples must be searched on disk, the current behavior remains.
- If the project has a flag that samples must be searched on disk, samples are searched (see Topics for discussion #1 and Searching for samples above) in a subfolder of the specified global folder. If the sample is not found, a window pops up asking you to specify the path to this sample. After specifying the path, the sample is copied to the search folder.
Conclusion
This is a very important request, the absence of this feature prevents us from using Redux as a sampler because our projects (especially the backup folder) start to weigh gigabytes. We have to use less convenient solutions that take samples directly from the disk. At the same time, the current behavior is very convenient for security and portability, so it should be left as the default behavior.
I really hope that this proposal will find a response and will be implemented.
- PROPHESSOR