Discouraged that song bundles for NS3 seem to be broken

[ajstan]

I haven't moved big bundles of songs around lately, though I learned a few years ago that NS3 song bundles create errors in batches larger than 5 songs. I have a really HUGE gig tomorrow and it's essential that my backup NS3 has exactly the same data as my gig NS3.

Hey @ericL - I don't think I saw this mentioned (apologies if I missed it), but is there a reason why you wouldn't do a full backup and restore to make sure both of your NS3s have exactly the same data? If you're not switching out Pianos or Samples, the entire backup/restore process is a few minutes once the cache is created on your computer the first time you create a full 2.5GB backup file. After that, only changes are transferred. That's how I keep my two NS3s sync for each gig.

[Spider]

I just got a second NS2EX as a backup-rehearsal board, and restored all the data from my other NS2EX to make it an exact duplicate.
I was using large bundles of whole banks, 70-90 songs each.
I had a couple of small hiccups: one of the bundles didn't load correctly, I re-loaded it and it went smoothly the second time.
Also, I got an error "Couldn't load White Grand" with one of the piano sounds. It turned out it was actually loaded correctly, but didn't show up until I rebooted the Stage. And the order of the pianos in the piano partition was changed randomly (corrected in a couple of seconds, but still...wtf?).

So it was nothing major and I sorted out everything in a few minutes. But yes, sometimes the Sound Manager messes things up a bit during saving/downloading bundles. It's always better to double-check everything carefully.

[anotherscott]

Funny thing I discovered about case sensitivity... Even though Nord has programmed the board to see upper and lower case as equivalent for the purpose of considering something a duplicate, they still treat them differently for sort purposes. If you view your programs by name, it will show you all the programs that begin with an upper case letter before showing you any of the programs that begin with a lower case letter! So if you're not sure whether you named a program with an upper or lower case initial letter, you may have to essentially look through your list twice in order to find it (i.e. first search the A-to-Z entries, then if you didn't find it, scan for the same songs in the a-to-z entries). And unfortunately, if you use the shortcut to jump to a specific letter, you can only jump to upper case entries, not lower case ones (which makes me think that the -put-lower-case-entries-at-the-end sort method is actually a bug, since you can't navigate to them as you can the others).

Normally, I'd prefer to have, for example, all the Programs that start with the letter A appear (in alphabetical order) before any of the ones that start with the letter B, regardless of whether they started with an upper or lower case letter, as it is on my Mac. But on the Nord, I see a nice way to take advantage of this separate sorting. You could name/rename all your favorite sounds to start with a lower case letter, and then, without even taking up a precious extra character (as they would if you had started them with, say, a hyphen), you could scroll to find all your favorite programs grouped together apart from all the others. Jump to Z, scroll down, and find all your most used sounds all together... cool, yes?

So while I think this may be a bug, I hope they don't fix it, I think it can be useful!

[ericL]

I haven't moved big bundles of songs around lately, though I learned a few years ago that NS3 song bundles create errors in batches larger than 5 songs. I have a really HUGE gig tomorrow and it's essential that my backup NS3 has exactly the same data as my gig NS3.

Hey @ericL - I don't think I saw this mentioned (apologies if I missed it), but is there a reason why you wouldn't do a full backup and restore to make sure both of your NS3s have exactly the same data? If you're not switching out Pianos or Samples, the entire backup/restore process is a few minutes once the cache is created on your computer the first time you create a full 2.5GB backup file. After that, only changes are transferred. That's how I keep my two NS3s sync for each gig.

I should probably do a better job of keeping both of my NS3 units identical, though it's challenging. I play in 3-4 bands regularly and I'm always doing some level of new program sound design for rehearsals and that typically happens within the "rehearsal" NS3 for weeks/months at a time until those songs/programs will translate to a gig situation. Then I review the set list for these upcoming gigs and realize "hey, there are 8 new songs I need to reconcile between the rehearsal NS3 and the gig NS3," which then drives me to these smaller bundles of "upload 8 specific songs so that I can download these 8 specific songs into the gig NS3"....I realize this sounds complex and it is. I will realize that I made some edits on the gig and then all bets are off with keeping them in sync...and one of the NS3 units has a few specialty items saved in it for a rainy day...it's all kind of chaotic but also fun.

Doing "full backup" from my experience has been time consuming and error prone...so I have this stress anxiety about it...which leads me to doing smaller bundles vs. the whole thing at once. I should probably do better in the future. Here I am after about 7 years doing the thing with two NS3 units, and prior to that doing the thing with 2-3 NS2 or NS2EX units. I have some practice with it. I just need to formalize how I'm keeping my various "rehearsal" and "gig" units at parity with one another.

This week I had two rehearsals and two gigs spanning three bands. I got to one of my gigs and was organizing the songs for the set list and I couldn't find one of the songs...I realized it was hiding in the "rehearsal" NS3 that hadn't been ported over to the "gig" NS3. I hope I'm not the only one facing these challenges. The good news is that I have so many programs created that can easily substitute for most anything...but when it is a highly specialized type of program including samples or loops...that is another story.

Thanks for contributing to this thread! It is helping me think about how I want to manage this situation in the future.