Backgroung : when i start a new song, i load a lot of instruments & sample, from which i will choose during my experimentations and the writing of the song. So i’m usually working with big song files (with flac compression, 400mb or more). Each time you save a song to disk, Renoise saves everything (pattern data, instruments data, samples, vst data, …) which end up waiting several minutes.
So my suggestion : an option to save instruments/sample path instead of the full data in the song.
There are other ways to do this, this one seems the simplest to me, but it is also possible to save the song in two files (one for song/pattern data, one for instrument/sample data), or maybe to implement an instrument/sample manager (like vst plugins) where you configure your instrument/sample paths…
This could be good with an option, because I don’t really need it: I work mostly with plug-ins, except for drums. I just don’t know how will it work with modified sounds, I mean what if you change a sample? Renoise will have to hash check (is that possible?) if the waveform alters and then save it? Save it where? And if you move the samples around, then what? Relocate everything?
And this won’t be good for people with multiple machines and/or constantly on the move.
I remember having this with MadTracker or something else. I moved my whole sample library to my portable HD, opened my track and got a nice message in the mood of: “Hey, you dik-shit! I can’t find your samples, so I’ll help the global community by delaying your crappy music production!”
I’d like something like this too.
Maybe in the manner cubase does it. A seperate folder in the project folder with all the samples.
This way I don’t have to delete backups of the song cause there not so big anymore.
Renoise doesn’t stream sampledata from disk; it loads everything into RAM and plays it from there. It has presumably has to write this all to disk every time you save because otherwise a lot of it (especially samples you’ve altered in Renoise) doesn’t have a filepath until it’s packed into an xrns.
Renoise desperately needs to be able to play samples from disk (to bring it in line with pretty much everything else on the market and to help it start to be taken more seriously by people who really need to do heavyweight recording/sequencing projects without eating up ~4GB RAM in the blink of an eye). Maybe when it has this functionality, a quick-save option would be feasible…but it’d still need to diskwrite anything that was hanging about in RAM and posssibly tidy up temp directories, etc. In other words, the sort of stuff Ableton Live does when you save.