When I try to load a heavy VST, or track or whatever… renoise will “hang” and whenever I click, Windows 10 will prompt me to “Wait” or “close the program”.
After a normal loading time, it will work fine…
The problem here being that Windows thinks renoise’s stuck, while it’s actually just loading stuffs. Probably some kind of miscommunication between the software and the OS.
do you have the diskop open while bringing renoise to the foreground? If I remember correctly Renoise scans the disk contents when having the diskop open and if you have a lot of files this can take a while. Does it matter if you have it closed or not?
Yep, that’s a Windows behaviour.
If a process / program is busy for an extended period of time - bringing its UI to front / clicking on it triggers window events which can not be processed in time. So the OS interprets that as a frozen state. As soon as the pending window events get processed that state is resolved.
On a loading-performance-related note:
on Windows (10), excluding
all folders which depend on loading a song
from Windows Defender, can shorten song loading times significantly.
Especially with songs which use a lot of plugins.
It is also like this on Renoise macos, so it’s is caused by the way it is coded. The gui would require a separate thread or so, but Renoise is constructed different, gui and audio is the same thread. Also I don’t find this really a show stopper, and development time is limited.
On the other hand, it is interesting how Bitwig managed to quite drastically speed up song loading times. Now it obviously loads faster than Renoise (I did not measure it though ). Sometimes while song loading in Renoise, there are even drive access pauses. Maybe Bitwig switched to so kind of clever mit threaded loading? So at least it seems to be possible to speed up loading times. The bitwig song already opens even if the vsts weren’t completely loaded yet, so you already can start to navigate.
On a loading-performance-related note:
on Windows (10), excluding
all folders which depend on loading a song
from Windows Defender, can shorten song loading times significantly.
Especially with songs which use a lot of plugins.
I think we need more ‘scientific’ proof / examples besides feels and placebo to get to the bottom of this. Some kind of example.xrns that shows this for everyone. I’m on i7 here with gazillion plugins not experiencing any freezing, so it might be configuration and specs plus shitty plugs?
Well I just excluded the renoise user library as well as the VST folders and the libraries for my synths from defender and already Omnisphere loads noticeably faster, and the presets load almost instantly. It was really sluggish before.
I confirm this really works.
If the songs were stored in binary format, loading would be even faster. But on the upside one might have a better chance rescuing the song data in ascii / xml format.
Becoming responsive isn’t a question of taking too long, it’s a question of not responding to events while doing stuff. For example, if everything happens in the GUI thread, and if the init code of a VST (or Windows Defender etc.) takes too long before returning. If the OS doesn’t “hear back” from a program you’re trying to interact with for a while, it asks if you want to wait some more or end the program.