Intense Tech #04 — Manage your LSDj save files with libLSDj (Defense Mechanism)

A command-line tutorial by defense-mechanism (intense-tech) for 4ntler's liblsdj tools lsdsng-export and lsdsng-import: listing what is in a pile of lsdj .sav files, pulling single songs out as .lsdsng files and building a new save for a live set.

Key claims#

• Save files come from flash cartridges or emulators such as BGB. The older LSDManager (by johan-kotlinski) manages songs one save at a time, which makes it "tedious" to know what is where; Lemondrop's lsdjSongManager is a GUI built on libLSDj.
• Listing: lsdsng-export -p saves prints every song in every save in a folder (subfolders are ignored); WM marks the song in a save's working memory; > songlist.txt turns that into a master list. The listing shows number, name, version and format per song.
• Exporting: lsdsng-export saves/SUNBURST.sav writes all songs as .lsdsng; -f puts each song into its own folder (handy across several backups: every version of a song lands together); -o Sunburst picks the output folder (created if missing); -n NAME and -i INDEX (index counts from 0) select songs and can be repeated or combined; -w extracts the working-memory song — a rescue when a song was never saved in LSDj.
• Importing: lsdsng-import a.lsdsng b.lsdsng builds out.sav; -o mysave.sav names it; -s mysave.sav appends a song to an existing save; lsdsng-import songs compiles a whole folder into songs.sav in file-name order — rename the files to order a set. On Windows, dragging files onto the executables works without a command line.
• Running either tool without arguments prints its help.

Practical takeaways#

Keep one folder of raw .sav backups, export everything with -f to get per-song version folders, and assemble live-set saves with lsdsng-import — the working memory export (-w) recovers unsaved work.

Notable quotes#

"…it's likely that you'll forget what's in your save files by the next time you need to put a new save file together."

Pages touched#

liblsdj · 4ntler · lsdj · tracking-workflow · intense-tech · defense-mechanism