posted 23 January 2010 21:05            

I was very excited to try out the new feature in X.73 where objects replicated by Prefixer or Replicator would have the properties of their widgets transfered from the original widgets. In the past I've spent hours transferring the widget properties by hand.

Unfortunately, it seems like only the minimum, maximum and grid values are getting transferred?

I also noticed cases where the min, max and grid values didn't transfer: if the name of the widget would cause the widget to get some special range of values, for example if the name starts with "Freq," the transferred values seems to get overridden. So if I have a widget prefixed by "Freq, it gets 0 min and 10000 max regardless of what the widget I am trying to copy has. I frequently tweek the default values, so it would be nice if these tweeks were picked up in the replicated widgets.

I would also like it if the relative sizes of the widgets was copied, along with the widget type and the widget labels (with just the prefix/suffix tacked on), show number, taper, customized ticks or value lists, etc.

It's a great idea for a feature, and could save me a lot of time (hats off to whoever suggested it at KISS09!). Would it be possible to extend it to cover these other properties?

Or am I misunderstanding something about the way it works now?

posted 25 January 2010 20:29            

Just tried editing an Oscillator prototype and the Replicator seems to be working correctly on my setup.

I tried playing it and setting min, max, tick marks & labels, widget type, and widget size. Then dragged Replicator to the right of the Oscillator, (set Left & Right fields of the Replicator to 1 in order to avoid conflict with the !AmpLow in the Oscillator) and played the Replicator. The resulting VCS had 4 copies of the widgets; each widget had the presets, min, max, tick marks & labels, widget type and size that the original had in the Oscillator.

Something must be different in the way we are doing things?

BTW, the Replicator copies the widget characteristics only the first time that widget has been introduced in the Replicator's VCS. In other words, after you have created the four copies of the Oscillator widgets, if you then go back and play the Oscillator on its own, and make changes to the Oscillator's VCS, those changes will not be automatically copied to the replicated controls in the Replicator's VCS.

posted 29 January 2010 01:49            

Thanks. On playing with it a little more and trying it the way you describe it, I find that it does behave the way you say if I start from scratch. But I find some odd things:

For example, I set up an oscillator with a couple of hot parameters and launch it and then made some adjustments in the VCS (changed min/max values, width/height, changed widget, added ticks and labels). Then I tried putting a prefixer in front of it and launched it, and I saw that the new widgets with my new suffixes had the same settings as the ones in the original Oscillator I had set up. But I also noticed that I had made a mistake, and had neglected to put a mixer that both the original and the prefixer would be connected to, so that now I only saw my values with the suffixes. I added the mixer in front of the prefixer and connected the original oscillator to the mixer and relaunched. Now my values that had the suffixes were set up as in the original oscillator VCS I had made, but my old oscillator values without the suffix had lost the height value that I had originally specified for them, and they also showed up in a different place in the VCS (they were in the bottom left corner, while the widgets with the new suffixes were in the place where I originally set them up).

Sorry, I know that is hard to follow, but maybe you can replicate the behavior from that description.

So then I tried again from the beginning and hooked them up correctly the first time, after having launched the oscillator by itself and adjusting the widgets (oscillator going into a mixer and the same oscillator going into the prefixer and that prefixer also connected to the mixer. This time both sets of widgets were set up the almost same way - one of the original widgets without the suffix had an incorrect width.

But what's interesting is that, within these sounds, when I go back and launch just the oscillator by itself, it no longer has the settings on the widgets that I started out the whole exercise by setting - they seem to have reverted to the default values you would get if you were starting from scratch. I hadn't deleted any layouts.

If I poke around in the various layouts that are created under my top-level mixer layout, I find the widgets in various states, some of which have all the correct widgets settings.

I still find the new functionality to be useful, but I'll have to play around with the order that I do things and see what works best, and then I guess do some adjusting of widgets as needed.