Renoise is unresponsive when loading heavy things

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.

Users might think Renoise is broken when it’s not

Be more specific, what vst(i), can you create a demo. Xrns?

Softube Modular for instance,

or any 10+ tracks stuffs. It happens when I go away while loading then click renoise

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?

What do you mean by “having the desktop open”

(thanks for the title edit @taktik :wink: )

Diskop is the browser in renoise where you select your files (samples, songs etc).

I tried to close it without much improvements… but thanks for the idea

I’ts always been that way here, though it’s a little better in 3.2.

But same thing happens in other programs (when opening a huge pdf in Adobe Reader for example). So not sure, this is Renoise’s fault.

Not a problem for me. Let it load, don’t click until it’s finished loading (there’s no point), and all should be well and good.

Yes, new users might think it’s broken. But with a little experience, they will learn this is standard behaviour.

I kinda agree with you but it happens a bit too much and Renoise goes full screen (hiding the bottom bar) when it’s unresponsive

This last point might be the most unsettling: it feels like something has gone setting when it’s not

Renoise goes full screen (hiding the bottom bar) when it’s unresponsive

True, that’s a problem. For that reason, I never load a (heavy) song in fullscreen or maximized mode.

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.

Let me know if anyone else can confirm this.

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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 :slight_smile: ). 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.

Let me know if anyone else can confirm this.

Yes.

You’re right, but that kind of thing can be a “deal breaker” for someone trying out renoise.

When ableton is slow, i’m like “my set is too big”

when renoise goes full screen and turns white i’m like “what the hell ?”

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.

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Well anyway, I’m sure the devs have enough information. If they don’t I’d be glad to provide anything they need