Speeding Up Saving A Song

Ideas & suggestions
1

I haven’t followed the forum for a while, and I hope I’m not duplicating a suggestion already made.

I’m doing a lot of work in Pro Tools, since it’s the most widespread tool in the sound editting business. PT isn’t always the most stable piece of software out there, which made me develop a habit of pressing cmd+s everytinme I do anything. It has come to such extremes, that I keep saving the session everytime I move the mouse. This isn’t any kind of problem in PT, because the only thing it ever saves is the session file. Saving that takes a fraction of a second and is barely noticable.

Renoise procedure of saving a song is very complex. Everytime you press cmd+s it saves all the samples (possibly compressing them to flac) along with the song xml file and packs it. With my subconcious habit of saving the song every time I look at a different part of a screen I sometimes feel like I’m spending more time waiting for the song to save than I do doing actual work. It’s especially true nowadays, when I use multilayered instruments with high quality stereo samples and long live-recorded sequences, which are often very large files.

The thing is, I don’t think I modify the samples in any way all that often. I believe me and a lot of other users just load a bunch of samples, maybe edit them and afterwards they just sequence the song.

My suggestion is - to speed up the song saving time - maybe Renosie could detect when a sample is editted in any way and save and compress the sample only in those circumstances? Normally Renoise could just save the xml file, possibly replacing it inside the zip file without repacking, if it’s possible within the zip format.

2

I second your request, it’s also my habit to save often, which sometimes isn’t a problem (when project is small enough or I am using a plugins), but when there are lots of big samples, things are starting to get painfully slow.

3

This should change if Renoise would support disk streaming.
since you can pre-hear al the samples from A song, maybe it’s possible that Renoise streams the content while needed.
this way you maintain the idea of having 1 file containing all.
but I think something as ‘audio tracks’ must be implemented for this and this is discussed many times.

4

Reading files directly from disk is the only real option for implementing audio-tracks, but I don’t know if it would work all that well with the built-in sampler. Still, it has little to do with the way renoise saves the song.

5

Yes, saving can be slow. If it wouldn’t take too much effort (for example determining which samples have been change and which samples not), speeding up the saving process would be very welcome.