Renoise, Reaktor File Versioning and the Joy of Human Readable File Formats
While trying to open an old project file I ran into an issue.
Since Monark is an Ensemble provided by Native Instruments as part of Komplete I was surprised. I was even more surprised to find the file in the exact path given by the error message.
Trying to select the file revealed what the real problem is: “This file was saved with a newer version of Reaktor”
My project file was saved using Reaktor version 5 but my version of Monark was eventually updated to be compatible with Reaktor 6. Since Native Instruments treats Reaktor 5 and Reaktor 6 as two separate plugins that can be installed side-by-side this presents a challenge.
My DAW has no way to know to retry to load the file using Reaktor 6 since they are viewed as two different plugins. This now means every project I have referencing Monark from Reaktor 5 is unrecoverable. I cannot add a new instance of Monark because it would not know what my saved settings were. My only option at this point would generally be to roll back to an earlier version of Monark.
Luckily, Renoise uses a human readable save file format. The XRNS file is actually a zip file that can be opened in any zip program.
Once inside you will find all the information in your song file inside of Song.xml. I am using Visual Studio Code to get nice syntax highlighting and XML tools but you can open it inside any text editor. Searching for the name of the instrument in question brings us to the proper part of the document and then I scroll down until I find the tags related to the plugin.
It would be reasonable to assume you could change all instances of “Reaktor5” to “Reaktor6” but this would be a mistake because Native Instruments is not reasonable.
Between versions the plugin name added a space because… reasons. Save your changes and the file now loads perfectly.
Unfortunately I see this situation all two often with music software where the ability to load old projects is not taken into consideration. At the moment it seems like the best way to protect yourself for when Native Instruments inevitability comes out with a new version of Reaktor is to save preset files for each track when archiving songs.
This situation was easily rectified because of the human readable file format in Renoise. If I was using a DAW with a closed file format I would have been in more serious trouble.