Hiya,
How can an rns file be so small (less than 1000kb) and contain so much sound? Where are all the samples? I use Ableton Live, and the songs can be well over 100MB with the audio samples contained.
Cheers
Today is the first day I learned about “Trackers”… this cool stuff 
It’s depending on the samples you use and how you use them, actually the sample size of a 16bit file will be bigger in Renoise, because Renoise uses 32bit internally. Ableton is a more loop based tool, which are usually much bigger then eg. a single kick drum sample. Maybe Ableton has a freeze function, which could also be the reason for big project files. You could make a simple test for yourself, load exactly the same samples in both programs and compare the files sizes.
basically, trackers users are accustomed to byte saving. the whole idea behind trackers has always been “the smaller the better”; the concept of a tracker application, with its focus on sample treatment, lets users to be able to get the maximum from smaller samples.
anyway, you can still use VST samplers, if you really want to play with big files 
yesterday i noticed something i thought was a bit weird:
i made some recordings in sonar (48khz 24-bit) and chopped them up
into about 30 samples, resulting in a total file fize of 17mb.
then i loaded all these samples into Renoise in a -blank/new- *.rns file,
saved it, and saw that the renoise-file wasn’t larger than 11mb!!
how can this be? does renoise actually compress wav.-files during loading of samples/
or saving of songs? doesn’t this mean the overall soundquality gets lower?
scratching my beird…
hmm, has anybody looked into this, or earlier noticed this?
Quite weird. Here, the .rns grows to the exact size of 23kb (empty .rns size) + sample size.
I investigated a little bit in this thread: https://forum.renoise.com/t/16bit-samples/17635
Didn’t try with 24-bit samples though, so I guess more testing needs to be done 
I just finished saving a 402mb rns file…for some byte saving is a lost art. 
Christ… What made your song THAT big?? 
When I do vocal music I rarely move above 50mb, but then again I don’t record live instrument sections…
Lots of MP3 reference tracks left open, mainly…
okey… i’ve done some experiments now, and must say i was a bit shocked by the result 
renoise imports 16bit files perfectly (by that i mean resulting in ‘right filesize’)…
example= loading a 2mb sample into a blank *.rns, saving it, and the rns results in about 2,02 mb.
okey, that’s good. and renoise gets it right regardless of what sampling freq i’m using.
but however, with 24bit samples it’s sadly a different story,
example= loading a 4mb 24bit sample, results in rns filesize of 2,8mb. WTF??
Renoise doesn’t bother about bits over the usual 16!! this is terrible…
am i missing something here? isn’t Renoise supposed to support 24bit files?
that would be really weird, since 24 bit has been the new standard for a few years now.
maybe it’s something i’ve done wrong, so i would appreciate if anyone else using 24bit could make a
short filesize-test too.
i did my testing in Renoise v1.5.1. this haven’t been one of the fixes for 1.5.2, right?
okey, thanks in advance for your replies!
Read Taktik’s reply in this thread:
https://forum.renoise.com/t/what-happens-to-the-bit-depth-of-samples-in-renoise/17667
thanks vvois, sorry for my sloppyness. cheers.