Could external sample editing not be made so dangerous?

Ok, so I found out the hard way that editing, saving and importing a sample via an external editor through Halion 4 OVERWRITES the original loaded sample found in a completely different directory of the temp directory set in the options in Halion 4… PERMANENTLY. I read the manual very carefully and noticed the words… destructive editing. Yikes!

Is there not a way to make this a little less dangerous, perhaps so that the originally loaded sample found in its own directory does not get overwritten at all and that only the temporary one does? I have thousands of samples which I created VST Presets for, for quick and easy loading + playing from within Halion 4. All of these samples are contained in their own ‘library directories’ based on the source from which the sample came from. I decided to play with the external editor feature of Halion 4, loaded up one my VST Preset based patches in Halion 4, played a bit, exported to my external editor, did fade outs and ins (since Halion 4 does not do this on its own :frowning: ) and imported the changes back into Halion 4. Since I did not save the VST Preset with the changes I had made, I figured I would clean the slate and move on. When I went to reload the sample I had just ‘edited’ I noticed it reloaded back as the changes I had made, not the original source!!! NO!!! I had lost a few samples to how they originally were like this.

Now… I need to know what the practicality is of things working in this manner? I have samples I would like to keep intact for future use exactly as they originally come. If I decide to edit a sample in an external editor to be a certain way for a particular project only, how do I keep from overwriting the original sample in case I want to use it again? I see no point in having the temp directory if the original directory still gets written to, shouldn’t the edited sample be saved AND reloaded from the temp directory leaving the original source untouched? The risk of forever altering samples through the external editor has left me extremely paranoid to even use it all now, despite how brilliant the idea is as I cannot afford to muck up my library in such a destructive manner. The best I could do was have a BAK file created for the changes which is stupid as well as the BAK file is not what is reloaded the next time you load a previously edited patch, it is still the WAV file. I have to manually go into the directory where the edited sample is stored, erase that file and rename the BAK file to a WAV file to get back to where I originally was. Convoluted and dangerous much?

There must be a way to leave the source directory completely untouched at all times when loading and editing sounds via an external editor. I would not even have to use an external editor if Halion 4 provided fade in, fade out and timestretching capabilities, but it does not, so now I am stuck with a workaround solution, yet one that is very dangerous to forever losing my sounds as I once knew them before the editing took place.