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Save Your Work

2012-09-19

I’m sure CZ users know the importance of saving one’s work often, especially if one is working on something important. This article is not really about that issue. This article should alert the user about some small gotchas concerning saving.

Saving Is A Two-Step Process

The most important thing to understand about CZSYSEXY is that saving is a two-step process. These are the two steps:

  1. If you made changes to a patch, you first save that patch back to the library.
  2. You must then save the library to disk, to permanently register the changes.

When you open a library, its contents are loaded into memory. There are now two versions of the library: the original on disk, and the one that is in memory. You can now edit any items you want, one at a time, and save them back to the library as you go. But keep in mind that the modified library exists only in memory. Your changes won’t be safe until you save the library to disk.

This process is a lot like editing a font. You open the font, and see that it contains many glyphs. You can now edit each glyph, one at a time, and save changes back to the font. But your changes are not safe until you also save the font back to disk.

There are advantages to working this way. Briefly, the advantage is that this two-step process reflects how most people work. You open a library, and make some changes here and there. When you are satisfied with all the changes, you save to disk. If you don’t like the changes, you don’t save.

unsaved_changes.png

CZSYSEXY notifies you when you have changed a patch, but not saved the changes to disk. It displays an unsaved changes icon, and it displays the name of the item in a contrasting color.

Strategic Saving

CZSYSEXY does not yet have an undo function. You cannot step back through the changes you have made, or progessively undo things. Instead, you have to use strategic saving:

  • When you have made changes that you know you like, save the library to disk.
  • If you have made changes that you know you don’t like, you should re-open the library so that the disk version is reloaded.
  • If you are going to try something weird, save before you try it, and be prepared to re-load your saved version if things don’t work out.
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