I’ve had a Lenovo Thinkpad T520 i7-2670M Windows 7 Pro since 2013, and adore the heck out of it, turning in a whole album made on the thing as well as the occasional remix, but I’m hitting 100% CPU in Renoise more and more often these days (mainly due to my relentless piling-on of VSTs). I’m toying with the idea of upgrading my system to a super-fast modern PC laptop (preferably one with a numeric keypad, widescreen and an SSD) and wondering how painless a process this is.
Has anyone done this? Is it a case of just copying and pasting my VSTs folders, doing a fresh install of Renoise (and Reaper) and it all magically works on the new machine? Or is it a whole world of pain? I have years and years of various plugins, including creaky old 32-bit ones from obsolete programmers, so am hoping it’s a straightforward process. Obvs Windows 7 is RIP as well, so I’m wondering does everything just copy and paste into Windows 10 happily?
And what’s a super-duper PC folks are using that calmly powers through dense Renoise tracks without breaking a sweat?
I’ve migrated Renoise + Reaper to many machines. No problem with the core stuff. I don’t think I had any issues with any VSTs, but that’s kind of a separate case.
I just backed-up my settings for each, installed on the new machine, and copied over my settings.
I think in the case of Reaper there’s a license file you need. Renoise seems to key downloads to the individual; I don’t think I’ve ever been prompted to enter a serial number or the like,
All my work was copied over with no issues as well.
I’m running Win 10 pro, but not a fan of the tile layout stuff, so I use Classic Shell to get that Win 7 look : ). (Also VirtuaWin to get proper multiple desktops.)
My PC was built a number of years ago for gaming so I spent extra on the video card. I think any modern mobo and multi-core CPU should be fine. And lots of RAM : )
Pretty sure everything you need is under %USERPROFILE%\AppData which you probably want to copy in it’s entirety anyway.
So for me my Renoise settings are under
c:\Users\james\AppData\Roaming\Renoise
and there are folders for each version of Renoise I’ve used.
Likewise:
c:\Users\james\AppData\Roaming\REAPER
which I think covers all the config and personalization.
There are, of course, all sorts of other things you may want to restore on a new machine (browser profiles, desktop backgrounds, etc.)
I hate doing it. There’s always many things you have to recreate by hand.
If you are moving to new machine then at least you should still have the old one (or at least the hard drive) so if something is missing you can go find it.