Self-Contained Scenes / Better Management for Samples and Wavetables

[Lizard-of-Oz]

What is the problem?

As a user I want to remove everything I don’t need from the SD-Card without breaking my scenes, so that I can keep everything organized, and because space on the Synth is limited.

Also I want to be able to backup or share a scene with somebody else without having to worry about samples or wavetables

What should this feature achieve?

Synth comes with a lot of samples for GRAINS and wavetables for WAVS, and when the user deletes or renames them, they will break the scenes and sounds that reference them.

Also space is limited, Synth cannot browse more than 256 Scenes, I assume the same limit applies to presets, samples and wavetables, and more that 256 items in a browser on a small screen might not be desirable anyway.

I can see two possible features that might remedy this, each one is valuable on its own, but they’d also go together:

• copying wavetables and samples into to the scenes that use them, which means that scenes are entirely self-contained .
• a “clean” command (somewhere in the menu) to copy all samples and wavetables that are not referenced in any scene or preset or to a sub folder called “unused”, so that the user can decide what to keep, and what to remove.

FAQ:

• What happens if a sample/wavetable is present both in the Scene and in the Samples/GRAINS or Samples/WAVS folder? the file in the scene takes precedence over files with the same name in /SAMPLES/…/
• Would samples/wavetables in the current scene folders show up in the sample/wavetable selector: Yes, with a suffix “(scene)”
• can the scene contain more than the referenced samples/wavetables? Why not, that might be a nice way to package samples and wavetables, all that’s necessary is when the user saves a preset from that scene any referenced files would need to be copied to the main sample/wavetable folders. A really neat feature, by the way, for delivering and organizing samples/wavetables
• How would the samples and wavetables be stored in a scene? in sub folders WAVS and GRAINS in the scene’s folder. That way the references in the preset don’t need to be changed
• When and how would samples and wavetables to be copied to a scene? That might happen automatically when a scene is saved, or manually, e.g. with a “pack” command that does this for all scenes, or for the current scene only, triggered somewhere in the menu.*
• would samples/wavetables moved to /Samplers/GRAINS/unused or /Samples/WAVS/unused sub folders show up in the sample/wavetable selector: No

Are there any workarounds?

Write a script to go through all Presets and Scenes on a computer to compile a list of the wavetables and samples used in presets. With that list, you can clean up and reorganize manually.

References to samples are at line 68¹ of a GRAINS preset

GRAINS/Foley_Rustled.wav

References in lines 61 and 62 in a WAVS preset (but there there’s something more in these lines, probably the position.

WAVS/BadSaws.wav ÄØ
WAVS/BadSaws.wav ÄØ::BD

¹if $0d can be seen as CR

But most users would not know how to even run such a script.

Any links to related discussions?

This wish might also elegantly resolve this one:

Allow for sub folders for samples and wavetables

What is the problem? As a user with a short memory and little time, but access to a literal shitton of samples and wavetables, I’d like to organize my samples and wavetables in folders so that it is easier to keep them sorted and identify find those I want to use. What should this feature achieve? ^ This. And since presets and scenes are also merely files in a filesystem, these too might benefit from supporting folders. Since the Preset Browser and the Scene Browser are navigated via the clic…

Any references to other products?

• 1010music blackbox has a pack function for presets that copies all used samples into the preset folders

[BROCKSTAR]

@Lizard-of-Oz

Also space is limited, Synth cannot browse more than 256 Scenes, I assume the same limit applies to presets, samples and wavetables, and more that 256 items in a browser on a small screen might not be desirable anyway.

I am confused on this. I am pretty sure there’s more than 256 when you buy it new. Also space is only as limited as the SD card i thought? So if i have 2,000 or 5,000 scenes, it’s up to how much the sd card holds, not the synth i believe? Same for presets, samples etc?

[Lizard-of-Oz]

When I bought the Synth, it came with ~90 Scenes. I also thought it was more, but 90 is already a lot on a display that shows only 8 at a time

I tested this, by creating 500 scenes (duplicated the existing scenes and renamed the folders to “Scene 1” … “Scene 500”. That way I could easily see how many scenes show up in the browser.

Full Synth Manual now in Downloads!

I think in that case it is good practice for a manual to select one term and use that consistently, everything else will lead to confusion. It already has Curious, I played around with this a bit, and I was only able to see a maximum of 255 scenes in the Synth, even though the folder on my SD card contained 500 scenes. But when I delete the first 250, I then can see the second 250 scenes. Maybe calling that slots it just confused me, because I took a look at the file system and the fi…

The manual says there is a maximum of 1000 scenes, see p.23 and p.31

[BROCKSTAR]

Hmm you’re right. I swear i thought there was a lot, but I only have 108 right now (added some since).

However I would assume that you could fit as many scenes, samples, presets etc that you’d want based on the size of your SD card? That would make more sense, but weird if it doesn’t work that way.

[Lizard-of-Oz]

Well, depends on how things are implemented. e.g. whether you read from the filesystem on the fly, or everything is kept in memory. In the latter case you’d limit the number.

I find it odd, too, but the manual explicitly talks about “slots” instead of “files”, and that metaphor has to come from somewhere. Slots indicate there is a certain number of those, and files indicate the limit to their number is dependent on the size of the storage medium.

Anyways, the wish is excellent even if the number of scenes and files were not limited

[BROCKSTAR]

I wonder if we could get @Mitch in here to clear that up for us