Whenever you save a file in Renoise, the entire XRNS file must be re-constructed from scratch. All the samples (regardless of whether they have changed or not) are written out to disk and then the whole thing is re-zipped.
My issue with this is that, because saving interrupts the workflow, I save less often, and if Renoise dies and can’t save a backup, I’m fucked.
I think Renoise needs a less intrusive save mechanism so that, at the very least, I can save my work more often. Even if it’s just writing out the XML file somewhere. CTRL-S shouldn’t be a coffee break, it should be a reflex.
Am I posting this because I just lost some data because I didn’t save because saving takes half a minute?
Damn right.
And, to add to this: with the “auto-backup” option on, Renoise will just lock up and I have to stop working while the backup saves. This is impractical to leave enabled.
I had been considering doing some sort of project based saving, which included autosave of specific options. (auto save song-data only every x-minutes, autosave all contents that changed).
But that requires quite some data to gather, to store and to restore. It is a lot of work to prgram this in Lua. If it has to be saved to the exact XML structure Renoise saves it into, it is a lot of more work.
Nevertheless:not impossible.
I’ve never had saves take more than a couple seconds, and they don’t interrupt playback. Does it depend on the song size/complexity? Or perhaps harddrive/RAM speed? I am running Renoise on an SSD and I have 16gb of fast memory.
Can someone upload a song file that takes them half a minute to save so I can benchmark?
How about an option (that’s been requested before) to save to a directory instead of xrns. If you unzip an xrns you get a Song.xml and a bunch of IntrrumentXX in SongData/. Simply saving this structure to a folder and referring from the zipping part combined with only saving things that changed since last save, should really speed the saving process up in.
yeah tbh those specs are pretty legit. this particular track is a 72mb XRNS file, and the computer is a core2duo l7700 (1.8ghz) laptop, 2gb of RAM, and magnetic-platter SATA drive.
so, pretty much the opposite of what you have. the funny part is that i can work on the track pretty well, it’s just saving it that brings my system to its knees.
yeah this sounds like what i was imagining. it’s definitely not unprecedented (afaik REAPER does it like this).