TonalDynamics
Member
Hello all! Hope you're doing well.
This post originally started as a question, but I discovered the answer for myself and thought I would leave it here to help others:
(If you are like me and have high channel counts combined with a high # of disabled insert plugins, this information will prove useful to you if you want to utilize the mixing SCENES feature at some point. If you are of a saner temperament and keep your song projects a lot lighter in terms of plugins and fewer channels, it may not be relevant to you.)
So the Mixer Scenes feature is a super cool concept; I can blend 30 mics 30 different ways, A/B them against each other, and have a total recall snapshot of every move I made on the faders, all without making absurdly time-consuming 'alternate MIX' versions of the same project.
So cool! (Does any other DAW not have this feature still?)
Sadly though, there is a rather large technical oversight in its implementation since it was released over 4 years ago:
The 'only selected channels' option only works for scene recall, and not scene saving, so every mix scene saves every single channel's settings regardless of what is selected; this makes a copy of each channel's insert chain in the console by way of saving each plugin's settings as a '.preset' file, causing project savetimes, savetimes per scene, and overall .song filesizes to skyrocket in large projects (mine has ~300 channels, most of which are hidden); this bloating behavior occurs even if all your tracks/insert plugins are disabled.
To give some context here, my .song file for the current project is ~35mb, and after saving a single mixer snapshot it goes up to 42mb. At 7mb/snapshot, using only 10 snapshots would cause my song to triple in size.
By following the instructions ahead, we will unpack the .song file's archive, delete the unnecessary .preset files for every channel we don't need to recall (In my case I was only trying to snapshot 30 channels at a time, no need for the other data), and then repack the newly-pruned folders into a .song to make mixer snapshots lightweight and usable.
First off, make copies of your .song file/s before you attempt the following; you CAN AND WILL ruin a song file if you make a mistake here. Backups are the way.
PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK:
Once you've tracked/programmed, and have started sliding them faders around to make it sound just right (or much worse), and you've made a bunch of Mixer Scenes to help you make decisions, save your .song and check the filesize.
Did it skyrocket?
Don't panic! We're going to trim the fat here.
(These instructions are for WinRAR on Windows 10, but any comparable file archiving software on macOS should be usable)
Right click your song file > Open With > WinRAR. Now drag-select all the files and folders, right click and select 'extract to specified folder', then 'OK'. Now locate the folder you just created, go inside and locate the 'Mixer Snapshots' folder.
I personally like to copy this folder directory/path and paste it into a filesize explorer (my personal favorite is Treesize) to see exactly what is taking up the most space. You'll see that the plugin .preset files will be the main culprit here, and specific plugins will have ginormous presets (sonible SmartEQ makes some that are 5mb per instance, I literally had to delete them all from my projects).
Go into each Snapshot folder in question and look at all the subfolders; these represent the 'save state' of the inserts for each channel in the mixer -- they do not represent anything else but the inserts, so you are actually free to delete everything in each one if all you want is the console moves.
If you DO want the insert plugins with their automation saved (likely), then delete all the folders except for the ones named after the tracks/channels that you are concerned with recalling in your mix scenes.
Now that you've slimmed those folders down a little, go back to the root directory, select all the subfolders and files (ARA, Clipdata, Envelopes, etc.), right click and select 'add to archive'. Under 'archive format' select 'ZIP', keep everything else the same, rename your song if you wish, add the '.song' extension at the end of it, and press ok.
Congrats, you now have your mix scenes without unmanageable project bloat
On the surface this seems like a big ol' tedious series of steps, but in practice you only have to do it once after creating a big batch of scenes you need to use, and you can then use them to your heart's content to A/B all kinds of submixes involving absurd channel counts. Yay.
In short, Mix Scenes are an incredible feature (if leveraged properly); hopefully this makes them a little more usable for some folks.
This post originally started as a question, but I discovered the answer for myself and thought I would leave it here to help others:
(If you are like me and have high channel counts combined with a high # of disabled insert plugins, this information will prove useful to you if you want to utilize the mixing SCENES feature at some point. If you are of a saner temperament and keep your song projects a lot lighter in terms of plugins and fewer channels, it may not be relevant to you.)
So the Mixer Scenes feature is a super cool concept; I can blend 30 mics 30 different ways, A/B them against each other, and have a total recall snapshot of every move I made on the faders, all without making absurdly time-consuming 'alternate MIX' versions of the same project.
So cool! (Does any other DAW not have this feature still?)
Sadly though, there is a rather large technical oversight in its implementation since it was released over 4 years ago:
The 'only selected channels' option only works for scene recall, and not scene saving, so every mix scene saves every single channel's settings regardless of what is selected; this makes a copy of each channel's insert chain in the console by way of saving each plugin's settings as a '.preset' file, causing project savetimes, savetimes per scene, and overall .song filesizes to skyrocket in large projects (mine has ~300 channels, most of which are hidden); this bloating behavior occurs even if all your tracks/insert plugins are disabled.
To give some context here, my .song file for the current project is ~35mb, and after saving a single mixer snapshot it goes up to 42mb. At 7mb/snapshot, using only 10 snapshots would cause my song to triple in size.
By following the instructions ahead, we will unpack the .song file's archive, delete the unnecessary .preset files for every channel we don't need to recall (In my case I was only trying to snapshot 30 channels at a time, no need for the other data), and then repack the newly-pruned folders into a .song to make mixer snapshots lightweight and usable.
First off, make copies of your .song file/s before you attempt the following; you CAN AND WILL ruin a song file if you make a mistake here. Backups are the way.
PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK:
Once you've tracked/programmed, and have started sliding them faders around to make it sound just right (or much worse), and you've made a bunch of Mixer Scenes to help you make decisions, save your .song and check the filesize.
Did it skyrocket?
Don't panic! We're going to trim the fat here.
(These instructions are for WinRAR on Windows 10, but any comparable file archiving software on macOS should be usable)
Right click your song file > Open With > WinRAR. Now drag-select all the files and folders, right click and select 'extract to specified folder', then 'OK'. Now locate the folder you just created, go inside and locate the 'Mixer Snapshots' folder.
I personally like to copy this folder directory/path and paste it into a filesize explorer (my personal favorite is Treesize) to see exactly what is taking up the most space. You'll see that the plugin .preset files will be the main culprit here, and specific plugins will have ginormous presets (sonible SmartEQ makes some that are 5mb per instance, I literally had to delete them all from my projects).
Go into each Snapshot folder in question and look at all the subfolders; these represent the 'save state' of the inserts for each channel in the mixer -- they do not represent anything else but the inserts, so you are actually free to delete everything in each one if all you want is the console moves.
If you DO want the insert plugins with their automation saved (likely), then delete all the folders except for the ones named after the tracks/channels that you are concerned with recalling in your mix scenes.
Now that you've slimmed those folders down a little, go back to the root directory, select all the subfolders and files (ARA, Clipdata, Envelopes, etc.), right click and select 'add to archive'. Under 'archive format' select 'ZIP', keep everything else the same, rename your song if you wish, add the '.song' extension at the end of it, and press ok.
Congrats, you now have your mix scenes without unmanageable project bloat
On the surface this seems like a big ol' tedious series of steps, but in practice you only have to do it once after creating a big batch of scenes you need to use, and you can then use them to your heart's content to A/B all kinds of submixes involving absurd channel counts. Yay.
In short, Mix Scenes are an incredible feature (if leveraged properly); hopefully this makes them a little more usable for some folks.
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