Copying Mixer settings: Shouldn't there be an easier way?

[Killahurts]

So I'm glad there's a workflow for this, been using it all day.. but it's time consuming (go to around 4:45):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giJis83-PTY

Rather than doing all this copy, pasting, deleting stuff.. can't we just have something that copies the mix desk over?

[EMRR]

I agree with your request completely and totally.

[Shooshie]

It would be nice, and I've thought so, myself. I've also thought about it a lot over the years, and I've realized that something is happening here that is part of a pattern, so if I explain that pattern, you may see why there's no direct way to do this.

DP is a fairly simple program at heart, at least as DAWs go. (I don't think any worthy DAW can be truly simple) In order to add power for the users, the programmers have added connections here and there, making it possible to do things that are not part of the original plan. Drag and drop of chunks is one of those things. First, it was drag and drop to the Finder. Then from the Finder to the Tracks Overview Window. It was a logical thing — maybe even an accidental by-product from those two additions — that made it possible to drag a selection to the Chunks Window, and vice-versa. In any case, that too became possible. Likewise, many dozens of commands were made possible that are undocumented in the manual, but accessible through the Commands Window (and self-explanatory from each command's title).

From all these commands, drag & drop, searches, and other additions, it is possible to piece together workflows that were not even conceivable in the original DP. If you imagine point A and point B, such that A is where you are, and B is where you want to go, it's often possible to create a series of steps from these commands and other tricks that result in an extremely powerful workflow that perhaps you discovered on your own. You tell people about it, and pretty soon everyone's doing it.

Next, you find people asking "why didn't they just give us a menu to do this, rather than making us jump through all these hoops?" It's a valid question, and if everyone is doing it and asking MOTU for a direct way to do it, it's possible they will add it.

The problem is that there are literally hundreds of possible workflows, and that no individual is likely to know them all, including the programmers who designed and built DP. Some are extremely useful, so they get used a lot, but when you think about it, there's no way that MOTU can provide a direct path for every one of those useful workflows. Even if they did, that would only generate even more shortcuts that elevate the power and usefulness of DP, and pretty soon people will be asking why those new possible workflows don't have direct paths. It's an endless spiral of feature creep, or sprawl in this case, which can never be "finished."

That's why I am always telling people to learn all those commands and see what workflows you can come up with. It's absolutely amazing. But I could not in good conscience ask MOTU to turn them all into direct commands. Think of the endless branching menu system you'd have to navigate to find them all! But when you practice the ones you've discovered and documented, they become fast and like 2nd nature. I make a habit of writing them down, even creating cheat-sheets to help me remember them all. A good place to start is in DP9's new notepad. You don't even have to leave DP to write it down, and later you can copy them to a central list to keep track of them all.

So yes, an easier way would be nice, and someday MOTU might do that. But we're talking about one of so, so many possible "tricks" you can do by stringing together commands and features that were provided for general accessibility, but they can be used in many different workflows for many different purposes. That's why I tell people that DP is so flexible, and that there are often many ways of arriving at the same destination.

Perhaps the more important thing is to identify things that simply are not possible with any number of commands, so that MOTU can add more basic "workflow building-blocks" to make exponentially more processes possible. Yeah, it seems very awkward when you see Magic Dave, or me or anyone else in a video demonstrating these odd combinations of steps, but you must consider that those steps were not necessarily designed for those particular results, but the workflow from point A to point B was discovered by someone and is being made accessible to everyone through the video. It's like exploring a cave with many secret passageways. People exploring them find they can get around quickly in the entire cavern system if they memorize certain turns down certain secret passages. So why doesn't someone just come along and blast a hallway that goes there directly? Because pretty soon you'd bring down the whole cavern with blasted passageways, where it really wasn't all that much more difficult just to follow the ones that had appeared naturally. (Again, think of the bloated menu system you'd eventually end up with.)

That said, I've often wished that it was easier to copy and paste mixes from one set of tracks to another identical set. There are often technical reasons which make that impractical, if for example one is not following a click track and the takes are of different lengths, or if you've added a track or two to one set of takes.

So, sometimes we just have to rely on our ingenuity, trying things to see what works, remembering some command that we saw in the list, and trying to find it again, then stringing together a set of steps that get you where you want to go. I have to admit that I find that extremely satisfying, like solving a maze or puzzle, where the reward is some advanced way of working.

Print out the commands. Memorize the menus. Study what you can do. Try things like dragging and dropping, just to see if a programmer thought of it and made it possible. Quite often you find that they did. And try not to look at these combinations of steps as awkward, but as discoveries of secret passages. It makes DP a lot more fun.

Shooshie

[EMRR]

All true, good points. It reminds me as well I'd love the ability to deactivate large portions of DP which I never use, a possible answer to cleaning up an endless selection of direct commands, BUT then you shut something down and never remember it's there as a possibility when it becomes useful.

[Killahurts]

From all these commands, drag & drop, searches, and other additions, it is possible to piece together workflows that were not even conceivable in the original DP. If you imagine point A and point B, such that A is where you are, and B is where you want to go, it's often possible to create a series of steps from these commands and other tricks that result in an extremely powerful workflow that perhaps you discovered on your own. You tell people about it, and pretty soon everyone's doing it. Shooshie

Agreed, that's why I'm so hopeful that Steven Slate will get his Batch Commander Software to work with DP. I love some of these commands, especially the MIDI to audio button. I really want that button..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iukHpGyd_1E