Assigning MIDI to effects in R6

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beatfix
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Assigning MIDI to effects in R6

Post by beatfix »

Hi All,

I realize I'm late to the party on this comment / request, but I only recently discovered that the way MIDI is assigned to effects has changed from R5 to R6. It used to be that MIDI assignments were linked to an effects slot, meaning you could rearrange the order of your effects, but knob 1 would always correspond to effects slot 1.

Now it appears that the MIDI assignments are locked to the specific effect - so if I have a stack of 8 effects, and I reorder them, the knobs are now in a different order than the effects. Also, if I swap out one effect for a new one, the MIDI assignment stops working completely.

Just wondering if this was a conscious decision, and if so what the reasoning was behind this change. For me, it has reduced the creative potential of managing effects chains.

Thanks,
jeff

Joris
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Re: Assigning MIDI to effects in R6

Post by Joris »

Yeah, this was a conscious decision. It was one of the most complained about features: "I assigned a shortcut to the brightness contrast effect but then I added another effect and now the shortcut is controlling something else! Double you tee eff, man!"

For what it's worth, I loved the feature too, but I can understand how it was confusing. Especially with the active layer focus, things could get out of hand really fast.

To quickly reassign shortcuts to different effects, the dashboard is all sorts of awesome though.

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beatfix
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Re: Assigning MIDI to effects in R6

Post by beatfix »

Thanks for the response - I had a feeling that was the case. I guess most people don't use the UI to keep track of their effects chains. It's too bad, I really loved the flexibility of being able to reorder effects and get different looks quickly, without screwing up the mapping assignments. But like you say, it's a trade-off depending on how people prefer to work, and I suppose in this case I'm in the minority.

I'd like to use the dashboard, but it always frustrated me that you can't clear dashboard assignments from the dashboard itself - by focusing a dashboard control and pressing "Delete", or by right-clicking a dashboard control and getting a "Clear" option, similar to clips. Instead, you have to go to the parameter(s) that you dragged to the dashboard (which is time consuming and not always easy to remember, especially if you have multiple parameters assigned to the control), and clear it there.

So, I humbly change my request, to an easier way to clear assigned controls from a dashboard knob :)

cheers,
jeff

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Re: Assigning MIDI to effects in R6

Post by Joris »

Good point well made!

If I can throw in that dragging a param to the dashboard while holding down a modifier like alt or shift, does the clear action and assigns the new param in one go, you've got yourself a deal.

Maybe somewhere down the line we can bring in the This ... / By Position / Selected paradigm for effects as well. But that's too far in the future to say anything sensible about right now.

Joris
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Re: Assigning MIDI to effects in R6

Post by Joris »

Hmmmm. Right-click already resets the dial to its default state... Oh well, we'll figure something out.

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beatfix
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Re: Assigning MIDI to effects in R6

Post by beatfix »

One more suggestion - it would be nice to drag an effect onto a dashboard knob and have it automatically map to the first parameter. The first parameter on every effect is always opacity, so the behavior would be consistent, and you would no longer have to unfold/refold the effect parameters every time you want to assign an effect fade to a dashboard knob.

I'm guessing opacity is by far the most commonly assigned parameter for effects, so it might help a lot of people - it would definitely speed up my workflow.

- j

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