Every time after starting Renoise, trying to load a sample—any sample of any size—takes a really long time and makes Renoise hang, typically for at least 15 seconds. Sample pre-hearing does not cause this, this still works normally, but just the act of loading the sample into an instrument causes the hang. Subsequent loads work fine for the most part, except sometimes randomly the hang still occurs after a while even after Renoise has been running for a while.
This started happening some time in the past year, under one of the 3.4 versions, not sure which one exactly, but it does happen with the latest release. I’m running up to date Windows 10 (22H2), and I don’t have any Antivirus installed. Tried disabling Windows Defender too just to make sure, but doesn’t make a difference.
Demonstration below. Note that every time it started, the first sample load hangs badly, but works fine after that.
So the sample file is Read quickly without issue, since when you preview it seems fine.
When you load a sample Renoise will Create/Write a Temporary Module in your TEMP folder.
Might help if you could let us know if the drive where the sample is, is the same drive as your TEMP folder?
If they are different drives, do you have any Power settings that put the drive to sleep after some time?
Renoise is installed on my main drive which is a fast M.2 SSD, and definitely isn’t going to sleep since is the OS drive. I presume the TEMP directory is stored there as well. I know at least the Renoise user configs are there in the AppData directories.
The samples in question there in the video are being read from a SATA SSD, which also isn’t in sleep. I also tried loading samples from other drives, including the main M.2 one, and the same issue occurs every time regardless of the source drive.
Also something I could’ve mentioned earlier is that the log file doesn’t contain anything suspicious or seemingly related to this; no meaningful errors or warnings or anything. I also tried this with different audio devices and a new song without a template, but none of that makes a difference.
However, something I am noticing just now is that if I do any sort of a write operation to any of my drives between loading samples in Renoise (for an example just creating a new .txt file on a disk), trying to load a new sample in Renoise immediately after that becomes slower again. Not quite 15 seconds slow, but a similar slowdown nevertheless. And immediately trying to load more samples without doing any more writes to any of the disks works again fluently.
Should also mention that my drives aren’t full, and according to S.M.A.R.T. are in good health.
Ok, ruling out slow spinning drive and drives going to sleep.
TEMP folder can be located by going to the command line and using the ‘set’ command like this:
When a computers TEMP file location has a lot of files in it, there can be slowdowns.
It might help if you use the ‘Disk Cleanup’ tool and select system drive, then check
off only “Temporary Files” for cleanup.
Also it could help to ‘Trim’ your SSD, although this is usually done automatically on a schedule,
here are the general steps to do it manually in case it was somehow configured for manual Trim.
Select the search bar on the taskbar and enter defrag.
Select Defragment and Optimize Drives.
Alright, I figured this out. So, a few months ago, I added my sample directory as an NTFS filesystem junction under the Renoise User Library, basically replacing the “Samples” directory there with a link to my actual sample collection that lives on a different SSD drive (my main system drive Renoise is installed on is too small to store the samples on).
However, this for some reason seems to make Renoise randomly freeze completely whenever it (apparently) tries to write something on disk, as explained before. The freezes I described earlier aren’t the only ones, but basically at least once ever couples minutes or so Renoise would similarly freeze for about 2-10 seconds. I didn’t initially make the connection though, but I now finally remembered this, tried deleting the junction from the User Library, and the problem immediately went away, no more freezing.
Now, this definitely seems like some sort of a bug, or at the very least a “limitation” in Renoise’s architecture. Any comments from the devs on this, possible to fix perhaps?
As a reference, below is the size of my sample library that the junction pointed to:
Edit: I’m not happy to have this marked as a solution. This is a workaround to the problem I’m having, but it doesn’t solve the underlying issue. Please unresolve and open the topic again.
