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I am an experienced DAW user, and I've recently decided to take on switching to DP, because of its chunk related features and native movie handling capabilities. I've been using DP 9.02 64bit since March of this year, and its becoming more of a challenge that I expected.

I've watched Shooshie's tutorials, and also searched around for others. I've purchased and watched the Groove 3 vids (including the advanced ones), and read the MIDI editing chapter in the user guide several times. I've reviewed Motu's vids, and read a book on DP. I don't think my failure here is because I lack commitment to digging in and studying!

I have not found a basic overview how the drawing feature functions, with either the pencil tool or the reshape tool. Specially, I am struggling with rudimentary capabilities such as drawing a 3-point spline to create cc contours. For example, it isn't clear to me how to tell DP you have completed tweaking a spline, or for that matter how to determine if DP thinks you are done.

After wrestling with the pencil and reshape drawing features for months, I still see some pretty surprising and oftentimes seemingly random results simply trying to draw in a spline, adjust the positions of the 3 points in value at time, and then commit the result to cc values. I don't know if this is because I am missing something or because of bugs.

Is there a good tutorial that just explains the fundamentals of the drawing interactions?

This is slightly tangential, but what is the difference between drawing in new data with the pencil tool vs drawing with the reshape tool in the "set" mode?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can assist!

SchrodingersCat wrote:I am an experienced DAW user, and I've recently decided to take on switching to DP, because of its chunk related features and native movie handling capabilities. I've been using DP 9.02 64bit since March of this year, and its becoming more of a challenge that I expected.

I've watched Shooshie's tutorials, and also searched around for others. I've purchased and watched the Groove 3 vids (including the advanced ones), and read the MIDI editing chapter in the user guide several times. I've reviewed Motu's vids, and read a book on DP. I don't think my failure here is because I lack commitment to digging in and studying!

I have not found a basic overview how the drawing feature functions, with either the pencil tool or the reshape tool. Specially, I am struggling with rudimentary capabilities such as drawing a 3-point spline to create cc contours. For example, it isn't clear to me how to tell DP you have completed tweaking a spline, or for that matter how to determine if DP thinks you are done.

After wrestling with the pencil and reshape drawing features for months, I still see some pretty surprising and oftentimes seemingly random results simply trying to draw in a spline, adjust the positions of the 3 points in value at time, and then commit the result to cc values. I don't know if this is because I am missing something or because of bugs.

Is there a good tutorial that just explains the fundamentals of the drawing interactions?

This is slightly tangential, but what is the difference between drawing in new data with the pencil tool vs drawing with the reshape tool in the "set" mode?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can assist!

viewtopic.php?p=85420#p85420

Thanks for the link to Shooshie's great tutorial. Unfortunately, it doesn't answer the basic questions I'm asking.

I am not able to get the spline drawing function to work consistently in point, bar, or line mode, with any of the various point density settings I've tried. After drawing the first stroke with the re-shape tool in "set" mode, I get a straight line with a handle point in at the mid point. Sometimes I can select the center point to change its shape to a curved spline (after the cursor changes to a finger point), but sometimes (usually) it just starts drawing a new spline! Sometimes it jumps inexplicably to what appears to be the final completion step of the first stroke of a completely different spline, starting at the end point of the previous first stroke?? Then, after multiple tries at trying to grab and move the middle handle point in the spline, once the shape change is actually successful, I've tried many different ways to get the spline to take. It seems clicking on the spline sometimes makes it vanish and sometimes not; clicking in the empty data grid sometimes works and sometimes not. Turning grid snap on and off doesn't help. Then trying to switch back to the selection cursor by pressing an A or an AA doesn't do anything- it just keeps showing that sine wave swirl, then going to the tool bar and hitting the button for the selection cursor takes about 4 or five presses before something actually happens, and when it does, the data often changes shape to an entirely different contour.

Shooshie's tutorial is great, but it doesn't show how to do the simple thing I'm trying to do - just draw in a spline, with either pencil or re-shape. I guess this must be some kind of crazy bug?

I hope not, because if I cant modify cc contours with a spline I'm pretty much not able to create music with reasonable efficiency.

SchrodingersCat wrote:Thanks for the link to Shooshie's great tutorial. Unfortunately, it doesn't answer the basic questions I'm asking.

I am not able to get the spline drawing function to work consistently in point, bar, or line mode, with any of the various point density settings I've tried. After drawing the first stroke with the re-shape tool in "set" mode, I get a straight line with a handle point in at the mid point. Sometimes I can select the center point to change its shape to a curved spline (after the cursor changes to a finger point), but sometimes (usually) it just starts drawing a new spline! Sometimes it jumps inexplicably to what appears to be the final completion step of the first stroke of a completely different spline, starting at the end point of the previous first stroke?? Then, after multiple tries at trying to grab and move the middle handle point in the spline, once the shape change is actually successful, I've tried many different ways to get the spline to take. It seems clicking on the spline sometimes makes it vanish and sometimes not; clicking in the empty data grid sometimes works and sometimes not. Turning grid snap on and off doesn't help. Then trying to switch back to the selection cursor by pressing an A or an AA doesn't do anything- it just keeps showing that sine wave swirl, then going to the tool bar and hitting the button for the selection cursor takes about 4 or five presses before something actually happens, and when it does, the data often changes shape to an entirely different contour.

Shooshie's tutorial is great, but it doesn't show how to do the simple thing I'm trying to do - just draw in a spline, with either pencil or re-shape. I guess this must be some kind of crazy bug?

I hope not, because if I cant modify cc contours with a spline I'm pretty much not able to create music with reasonable efficiency.

Sorry, I guess I jumped the gun without reading thoroughly and understanding your problem. Sounds like a bug by your description. I'm still on 8.x DP and Mac OS/X, so I'm probably not going to be able to reproduce this on my system.

When you are done with the pencil or reshape tool, just click anywhere in the CC lane away from the curve and points. That completes the edit.

Yeah, I had assumed that clicking in the lane somewhere away from any curves or points would result in finishing the edit, but that doesn't work. I think I am dealing with a bug.

KDM, are you using DP 9.02 64bit on Win 10?

I discovered today that pressing the <Ent> key works reliably to end the edit session. But *NOT* the <Ent> key on the numerical keypad (I checked with Num Lock on and off). There is no way I can find to end the edit with a mouse click.

I am suspicious that the behavior I've seen when trying to drag any of the 3 spline points is related to the size of the mouse cursor "hit box" for each point. I think there is a discrepancy between the visual feedback (when the cursor changes from re-shape sine wave to the hand/finger) and the actual selection zone that determines the association of the mouse click to the point. My educated guess is that the actual hit box size is much smaller than the radius of sensitivity that is used for the visual cursor change.

I am submitting a tech link to MOTU.

DP 9.02 here, on Windows 8.1 on my main system. But I just tested this in 9.02 on my Surface Pro 3, which is running the latest update for Windows 10, and both the pencil and reshape tools work as expected - move spline points, and click anywhere to apply the changes.

It does sound like a bug there. As of Windows 8.1 and 10, I know there are window focus changes (run into a few bugs with 8.1 itself in that regard). DP typically takes complete control of the GUI/input focus, so it sounds to me like some change in mouse or window focus (either in your Win10 config, or due to another application) has caused a conflict between DP and Win10.

Are there any other applications running?

If MOTU finds a solution, let us know. This could easily happen on other systems given the focus issues I've seen with 8.1 and 10 from time to time.

I've been trying to reproduce this as a bug and everything seems to work fine for me.

Could you take some time to download Licecap and make a quick shot of what's happening on your system for us?

edit: I can't link to licecap... how utterly stupid. This forum sometimes

Does this consistently happen after a system reboot? Another potential cause could be a "stuck" alt or esc key - not physically stuck on your QWERTY, but not seen as released by the OS. I have seen this happen in a few other DAWs (ProTools had this issue at one time). It can cause similar problems. That isn't the most likely given the symptoms you are describing, but it is possible.

Rebooting does not help.

Motu's tech support guy Andrew hypothesized that one or more of my preferences files may be corrupted. I moved the 2 folders out of DP's app data folder and the problem went away (along with all my fancy MIDI routing work that took hours to set up).

So, this is either a bug that is invoked by some very specific combination of things I've set up, that is defined in one of the files I moved, or one of the files is corrupted as Andrew suggested...

Robert Randolph wrote:I've been trying to reproduce this as a bug and everything seems to work fine for me.

Could you take some time to download Licecap and make a quick shot of what's happening on your system for us?

edit: I can't link to licecap... how utterly stupid. This forum sometimes

Robert - I did download licecap and captured some footage. Here's a weird one - the resulting footage has the mouse cursor moving around at a completely different position on the screen than where it actually was.

I'm using a GTX980 graphics card and 3 HD monitors. First graphics related issue I've seen on this rig. Maybe an issue with licecap, but who knows. Very strange stuff going on here...

SchrodingersCat wrote:

Robert Randolph wrote:I've been trying to reproduce this as a bug and everything seems to work fine for me.

Could you take some time to download Licecap and make a quick shot of what's happening on your system for us?

edit: I can't link to licecap... how utterly stupid. This forum sometimes

Robert - I did download licecap and captured some footage. Here's a weird one - the resulting footage has the mouse cursor moving around at a completely different position on the screen than where it actually was.

I'm using a GTX980 graphics card and 3 HD monitors. First graphics related issue I've seen on this rig. Maybe an issue with licecap, but who knows. Very strange stuff going on here...

Would you be able to see if the bug itself still happens if you disable 2 of the monitors?

Perhaps that is a clue?

The issue was that I was doing this on my larger monitor that happened to be using a non-unity scaling ratio - Licecap doesn't work right with Windows 10 scaling.

So, after trying Andrew's suggestion, the weird drawing problem returned within an hour.

I'm going to send Motu support my project file, could be a while before I hear back; I will post any news.

For the record...I have always had issues with drawing curves and modifying them (with the mouse or Wacom Intuos tablet). It seems like the points along the curve have a mind of their own. I finally discovered that my Akai MPD32 Pro plays nicely with DP. From being able to see numerical changes of parameters on the LCD screen to assigning CC#s to the knobs and sliders to get the curves I need. In fact, it works really well for controlling the instruments and articulation matrices when using VEPro (currently using VEP6...way more stable running Waves plugins than VEP5). For any surgical changes, I just slow the tempo down and make the changes with the assigned knob/fader.

As a side note...I also use a nanoKontrol2 when I don't care to see numerical values. It too works well with DP.

My goal was to acknowledge that I experience a bug in drawing and editing curves and mention my method that restores the workflow in a much more powerful way.