With Session Management you can easily restore complex sessions involving numerous applications including their particular state. Hydrogen does support some Session Management systems too.
![[Warning]](../img/admonitions/warning.svg) | Warning |
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All the supported Session Management protocols are Linux only. There is no (tested) support for MacOS and Windows yet. |
NSM: Non Session Manager (NSM) is of 2021 the de facto standard in Session Management tools within the Linux audio community and Hydrogen does over full support and compliance to its API.
![[Tip]](../img/admonitions/tip.svg)
Tip We highly recommend using this protocol for Session Management.
LASH: Hydrogen provides a basic support for LASH Audio Session Handler (LASH). This covers recalling the song used within the session but, unlike the NSM support, no recalling of the JACK connections and no per-session preferences.
![[Note]](../img/admonitions/note.svg)
Note You have to activate LASH support in the General tab of the Preference dialog in order to use it.
JACK Session: JACK Session has been marked deprecated by the JACK project.
Warning Hydrogen versions <= 1.1 still feature this Session Management protocol. But it will be removed in future releases.
Hydrogen will be under session management if you start it via a NSM server application, like RaySession. You can easily check whether Hydrogen is aware of the session by checking out the Project option of the Main Menu as some action will have changed in order to comply to the NSM API.
Replace With New Song: instead of New. Replaces the song associated with the session by an empty one.
Import Into Session: instead of Open. Replaces the song associated with the session by a song of your choice.
Import Recent Info Session: instead of Open Recent. Replaces the song associated with the session by one of the recently used songs.
Warning In Hydrogen version 1.1 the import into a session is not yet fully supported. While the selected file will be loaded and you can work with it, Hydrogen won't recall it after closing and opening the session. You need to copy the corresponding .h2song file manually into the session folder to make your choice permanent.
Export From Session As: instead of Save As. Stores the song associated with the session at a location of your choice as .h2song file.
Note In contrast to the Save As command the underlying path of the current song will not be changed. All subsequent Save actions will store the current state of the song to the file in the session folder and not to the path of the exported file.
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The Open Demo option will be missing. |
Both the song and the preferences associated with the session will be stored in a session folder called Hydrogen.*. In addition, the drumkit (and its samples) used with the song will linked into the session folder as well. If the link is replaced by a folder containing a valid drumkit, this one will be used over the system and user drumkits.
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This allows you to create fully self sufficient backup of your Hydrogen session using tar -chf. These can be even ported and used to systems which do not have the required drumkits installed. |