Pros & Cons of various macro utilties: QK vs KM vs CM vs ??

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Re: Pros & Cons of various macro utilties: QK vs KM vs CM vs

Post by bolla »

Could you outline some of the routines that you use these utilities for?
Do you use them just within DP or across various apps and the finder?

Cheers, Bolla
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Re: Pros & Cons of various macro utilties: QK vs KM vs CM vs

Post by Shooshie »

bolla wrote:Could you outline some of the routines that you use these utilities for?
Do you use them just within DP or across various apps and the finder?

Cheers, Bolla
I've been using QuicKeys for nearly 30 years. I could not count the number of computers I've run it on, nor the apps I've used it in, much less the tasks for which I've built workflows in QK. I've used it professionally, personally, productively and frivolously, and my created shortcuts probably number close to a thousand, totaled over all those years, operating systems, and computers. That said, here are a few examples:

In Digital Performer:
• In DP, I like to change track colors often, as needed, to better see whatever I'm working on. I have about 30 color sets which I can run through in seconds to audition the best one for the task at hand. Some have higher contrast, some have higher aesthetic value, some simply emphasize one set of tracks over another. By using sticky triggers and the numeric keypad, I can run through them very quickly. It involves one of two initial commands, followed by rapidly typing the rows of the keypad. The colors change quickly, and I can immediately zero in on the one I want. It usually takes me less than 5 seconds to find what I'm comfortable with for a while.
• I've used exactly the same keys for Window Sets. I keep cheat-sheets nearby, sometimes on little stands by my monitor, to make it easy to go right where I want without having to run through dozens of window sets. I no longer use this very often, because now I keep all my major windows open all the time, each in its own "Space." Going from window to window, all at full-screen, is just the act of shifting from space to space.
• I've used QK to convert controller types in vast numbers of continuous data.
• Ditto velocities, durations, even common transpositions
• Anything that was hard-wired into DP's key bindings, I could change to my own commands.
  • Note: DP's commands have grown so plentiful that I no longer need to do most of them in QK.
• Turn on/off QuickFilter, a mouse-only click, instantly doable with QuicKeys via keyboard command
• Changing Continuous Data Mode (Points, Bars, Lines) — also a mouse-only setting
• Open Adjust Beats
• Export selection
• Bounce to Disk
• Set track names with iterations (Sax 1, Sax 2, Sax 3...)
• Set Chunk Start
• Insert Trim Plugin and set to user preset

Other apps:
• In Safari, I have keys for all formatting codes for general forum bulletin-board type message systems. Example: the bold-faced fonts you see here, the indentions, any kind of link, and often entire lists of links that I use a lot are all just a keyboard-command away. If my posts look like I spend a lot of time on them, it's usually because QK does all the heavy lifting. I have the same codes set for TextEdit, so that I can compose messages there, then paste them here. I don't always do that, but if it's a very involved post, I'll prefer to work in a larger window, come back to it repeatedly over time, and not worry about losing it in Safari by accidentally closing the window.

• Sometimes I find myself using apps programmed by people who apparently never graduated from the 1980s. Navigation is by mouse-only, and often very awkward reaches to get anywhere. Usually I can bring those into the 21st Century with a few well-placed QK shortcuts.

• In 2004 I was recuperating from surgery and couldn't move from my chair without great difficulty, so I looked for things to do online. I found web-cams all over the country which would show a beautiful scene in real time or every minute, or quarter hour. I started downloading frame-by-frame, then putting them together into a time-lapse movie showing clouds going by, sunsets, or even seasons changing. I still do that, though not as much as I did during some years. QuicKeys enabled me to take a lot of the grunt-work out of it. It can download the frames every x-interval of time, then it can rename them, store them in a folder, retrieve them, load them into Quicktime, and make a movie out of them, name it, and save it. Oddly, I still do it by hand occasionally, but the machinery is all there in QK to do it if I want to. It involves a wide variety of tasks. What QK cannot do is determine if each frame downloaded completely and correctly. WebCams are notoriously inaccurate, often failing to send a picture until 2nd or 3rd try, often sending a partial picture. Quicktime cannot use incomplete pictures as a frame in a movie, so I have to go through every frame and delete the ones that are incomplete. Sometimes that makes for a very rough movie!

• Countless times over the years I would be creating a spreadsheet, compiling information for a publication, or any number of odd tasks with repetitive movements. If I could make a shortcut in just a few minutes, I'd do it even for one project, and save my wrists for other things like playing piano.

• I played Sim City since the first version, and always loved it. I excelled at making cities grow and prosper. In some of the more recent versions, the tools existed to make beautiful cities that you could even "drive" through (or ride a train, boat, or plane). At some point I started enjoying the design and building of such cities, which were almost impossible if I had to keep them out of bankruptcy, so I began using cheat codes to add money to the treasury. Trouble is, the code for Sim City 4 only added $1000, and I needed tens of millions. QuicKeys to the rescue! I'd set it up to run while I slept or was away, and when I came back there would be $50 million or twice that. That gave me the freedom to build anything I wanted, and not worry about playing the game. Interestingly, many of those cities would later become profitable and self-sustaining. I'm surprised that Maxis did not include a "free-play" mode for that purpose. Of course, if they had, nobody would have played the game, and people would have missed the point of Sim City.

My problem in creating a list like this is simply memory. I can't remember most of what I've done with QuicKeys. There were periods during which I rarely used it, and periods when I used it constantly. Sometimes it feels like cheating, especially when it's doing complicated tasks that take hours, and I just stop in now and then to watch.

Shoosh
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Re: Pros & Cons of various macro utilties: QK vs KM vs CM vs

Post by bolla »

Shooshie wrote:
• Turn on/off QuickFilter, a mouse-only click, instantly doable with QuicKeys via keyboard command
• Changing Continuous Data Mode (Points, Bars, Lines) — also a mouse-only setting
• Open Adjust Beats
• Export selection
• Bounce to Disk
• Set track names with iterations (Sax 1, Sax 2, Sax 3...)
• Set Chunk Start
• Insert Trim Plugin and set to user preset
Thanks Shoosh,
Your contributions are so helpful.
Just the "Insert [blah] plugin and set to user preset" would be worth pursuing. A great time saver.
Cheers, Bolla
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Re: Pros & Cons of various macro utilties: QK vs KM vs CM vs

Post by MIDI Life Crisis »

Don't encourage him!
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Re: Pros & Cons of various macro utilties: QK vs KM vs CM vs

Post by stubbsonic »

Here's another example that pretty much any macro program can do.

I had a long list of Impulse Response audio files that I needed to truncate and format convert. Though I could have used a batch converter, I also needed the process to pause for me to do
something specific related to the filename during the 'save' step-- then continue. I didn't want the batch to run uninterrupted, because I didn't want anything unexpected to happen to my files.

So I had a finder window open with my list of files. I'd start with a selected file at the top of the list. I'd trigger the action, it would automatically open in the audio editor, do everything I needed it to do, then pause at the naming window. I'd type in the name during a pause, and then it would switch back out to the Finder window and cue up the next file at which point I'd then hit the trigger again. Whizzed through a couple hundred files that way.

OTOH, there was something I needed to do in DSP Quattro, but because of the way DSPQ's UI (user interface) was structured, I could not reliably zoom, scroll, or select a range using a macro. I tried for a couple hours, then gave up. That is also part of the risk.

It's a fun process that requires a cool combo of creativity and cleverness to get a process that works. Once it's ready, you hit GO. Before you know it, a process that would have taken hours and sucked your soul dry, takes only minutes and is kind of fun. For things you know you'll do more than one time, it is totally worth investing the time designing the macro.

On the topic of active development, we get to a tender subject. Shooshie has invested much time and creative cleverness into his many QK shortcuts. At some point, he may have to either lock down his OS (i.e., stop updating) to keep using QK, or choose another macro utility and rebuild his essential shortcuts.

I haven't invested that much time into QK and have been a little reluctant with four major Mac OS versions and no updates for QK since 2009. We don't really need to detail the back story here. But it is a factor. The software might be excellent, and still "substantially" work in 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, and 10.10; but no active development likely means reaching a point in time whereyou must choose between 10.xx (20xx) and QK 4.07 (2009).
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Re: Pros & Cons of various macro utilties: QK vs KM vs CM vs

Post by Shooshie »

stubbsonic wrote:On the topic of active development, we get to a tender subject. Shooshie has invested much time and creative cleverness into his many QK shortcuts. At some point, he may have to either lock down his OS (i.e., stop updating) to keep using QK, or choose another macro utility and rebuild his essential shortcuts.

I haven't invested that much time into QK and have been a little reluctant with four major Mac OS versions and no updates for QK since 2009. We don't really need to detail the back story here. But it is a factor. The software might be excellent, and still "substantially" work in 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, and 10.10; but no active development likely means reaching a point in time whereyou must choose between 10.xx (20xx) and QK 4.07 (2009).
Most of my current shortcuts were created in the past few years, so it's not like I store up shortcuts for decades. That's why I can't accurately count them or describe them. I'm not really sure why I do that. I think early on I found out that apps change, routines change, menus change, so old shortcuts generally require tweaking, which can take as much time as starting from scratch. Every so often I go through the shortcuts within an app and turn off the ones I don't use. Later, if I still don't use them, I'll just delete them. New versions of QK are times when I occasionally start over, maybe saving the most difficult QK shortcuts or groups of shortcuts rather than rebuild them.

Also, if I trigger a shortcut, but nothing happens, I'll switch to QK and often see a dialog saying that the routine stopped. I just throw those out and remake them. Why spend all morning trying to see why a shortcut stopped working, when you can just remake it in about a minute?

For these reasons, I'm not as afraid of a big change as one might think. There is the learning curve of the new app, but rebuilding the shortcuts doesn't really take all that long. Nevertheless, I'd rather not have to do it if I don't HAVE to. I'm staying with QK for now for two reasons:
1) My current computer is so good that I'd like to keep using it. It's almost 3 years old, but I think I'll get 5 years out of this one, unless Apple twists up their OS so that it makes older Mac Pros obsolete. (they do that) So, as long as QK still works on this computer, no need to change.
2) This isn't the first time QK has gone years without a change. The old Classic MacOS versions of QK were so well-written that they just kept on working, version after version of the OS. When an update was required, CE Software would send it out, but until then you didn't hear from them. So, I have a feeling that Startly will do the update when it finally MUST be done. Either that, or they're on their way out of business. Startly has had quite a run of bad luck, and yet they've been able to put out a version of QK that's worked through several versions of OS X. That's a good sign.

The latest bad luck took place about 4 years ago when their lead programmer for QK died without warning. He had a 20 year history of programming QK, so nobody else quite knows it as he did. They've been looking for someone to do it since then. One of the problems with Startly getting a programmer of that caliber is that they are located in Des Moines. Not that their programmer has to live there, but it's just not the same as being in Silicon Valley where you can have someone in a couple days. But they've survived all this time, and I have no reason to believe they won't survive this until we get the sign when clicking on their website: "404: Not found." 30 years is nothing to sneeze at. QK was THE macro tool for the Mac. It wasn't buggy or weird. If it said it did something a certain way, then it did it. It always worked. I never crashed QK in the old days, and only when version 3.0 came out did it ever crash for me, and that was rectified very soon.

So, I think QK will be back in full swing, but if it's not, then switching to another app will not be a big deal for me since I tend to rebuild my shortcuts every few years, anyway.

Shooshie
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Re: Pros & Cons of various macro utilties: QK vs KM vs CM vs

Post by philbrown »

I edit and master a lot of spoken word seminars. Years ago, my clients wanted some 'courtesy tracks' I'll call them on the CD's, IOW I just placed tracks every 5 minutes so the listener could at least roughly scroll forward and back through the CD's which were between 60 and 74 minutes long. I was using Waveburner at the time and wrote a QK macro that would place all those track markers with one keystroke. It was quite a timesaver -and kind of fun to watch!

The number one thing I would use a macro for these days is to switch back and forth from Soundbite to Volume layers in the sequence editor. Too bad there are dozens of super-esoteric commands you can key bind in DP, but not common mini-menu items.
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Re: Pros & Cons of various macro utilties: QK vs KM vs CM vs

Post by frankf »

philbrown wrote:I edit and master a lot of spoken word seminars. Years ago, my clients wanted some 'courtesy tracks' I'll call them on the CD's, IOW I just placed tracks every 5 minutes so the listener could at least roughly scroll forward and back through the CD's which were between 60 and 74 minutes long. I was using Waveburner at the time and wrote a QK macro that would place all those track markers with one keystroke. It was quite a timesaver -and kind of fun to watch!

The number one thing I would use a macro for these days is to switch back and forth from Soundbite to Volume layers in the sequence editor. Too bad there are dozens of super-esoteric commands you can key bind in DP, but not common mini-menu items.
Check out what's available in the contextual menus. Many, but not all, mini menu commands are available via right-click and these can easily be programmed as macro actions in KM and I'm sure in QK as well.


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Re: Pros & Cons of various macro utilties: QK vs KM vs CM vs

Post by williemyers »

guys, this is a *very* valuable thread, but a bit long in the tooth now. any updated opinions for those of us looking for a macro app? (or one that plays well on 10.11 or 10.12?
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Re: Pros & Cons of various macro utilties: QK vs KM vs CM vs

Post by stubbsonic »

Looks like both Keyboard Maestro and Controller Mate have both updated recently and both support the latest Mac OS. But that's all I know. I've not be using any of them of late.
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Re: Pros & Cons of various macro utilties: QK vs KM vs CM vs

Post by williemyers »

stubbsonic wrote:...I just downloaded the CM demo and will work with it in the next few days as I have time.
Jon, did you ever get to try this one out?
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Re: Pros & Cons of various macro utilties: QK vs KM vs CM vs

Post by JSmith1234567 »

I am using Keyboard Maestro w/ Sierra and DP 9.12, and it works great.

Used to use Quick-Keys for years but they seem to have abandoned it?

This particular link has been very helpful to me for using it with DP...

http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/document ... #how_mouse
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Re: Pros & Cons of various macro utilties: QK vs KM vs CM vs

Post by stubbsonic »

I'm sorry I can't offer any help here. I decided on Controller Mate. The feature set is good, and the developer was quick to respond to some early questions. However, I've just been busy working and haven't had the necessary chunk of contiguous time to set things up with macros.

You have to determine what kinds of things you would be doing and see which of those apps will cover it. Perhaps also, you decide which interface for building sequences will suit your brain & workflow.

QK is hard to recommend since it is currently abandonware. However, both CM and KM get regular updates so they seem to be much safer choices.
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Re: Pros & Cons of various macro utilties: QK vs KM vs CM vs

Post by frankf »

+1 on KM. Now wait for Mike to chime in for QK :) search for topics onQK and KM
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Re: Pros & Cons of various macro utilties: QK vs KM vs CM vs

Post by Rusty Shackleford »

JSmith1234567 wrote: Used to use Quick-Keys for years but they seem to have abandoned it?

QK senior developer died years ago and the program has not evolved or been taken over by anyone else since. +1 for Keyboard Maestro. Works great.
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