File Management

How to organize and handle your projects and files

Arrangement Templates

When Synfire opens a new arrangement window, it looks into the folder Templates inside your Configuration Folder and presents the files in there as starting points for new work. By saving additional arrangements to that folder, you can extend this collection of templates to support your personal workflow.

Reverting To a Previous Version

Synfire keeps backups of previous versions of your files in a sub-directory backups next to the file. The maximum number of versions to keep can be set with Preferences.

If you want to return to the last saved version and have not yet saved the currently open file, you can do so with File > Revert to Saved.

If you want to restore a previous version, look it up under File > Backups and select the version you want to restore. Doing so will merely open that file and not change anything on your hard drive until you save it.

Tip: To free up space on your hard drive, you can delete all previous back-up copies of a file at once with File > Remove Backups. You may safely delete the folder backups altogether, but be aware that this will remove a lot of backups of several other files also.

Archiving Projects

Future versions of Synfire may potentially use new algorithms that produce slightly different output, as the rendering technology evolves over time. You should therefore not rely on Synfire documents as a long term storage format for your finished work. Be sure you export your work to notation programs, to a DAW or to Standard MIDI Files, before you upgrade to a new version of Synfire.

Note: Although many random decisions are involved with the rendering process, Synfire always produces the same output for the same input parameters. This is because random streams get reset to a defined initial state before each run.