Chunks In Alphabetical Order

[sugardilly]

I use DP 6 in my home studio and plan to upgrade to DP7 soon. However, I've just started using DP6 on my old faithful PowerBook G4 laptop for a live gig with a singer. I took on the gig from another musician who was working with 2 Motif ES 6. He was able to load a song on o e while the other was playing for a seamless performance.

He have since left the gig and the singer purchased ONE of the ES 6 keyboards which obviously didn't allow for smooth transitions between songs. So I firstly learned how to operate the keyboard and then transferred all of the MIDI sequences to my laptop in DP 6.

I LOAD all of her MIDI songs Into one song so they show up as Chunks and I'm able to either put the songs in order before her performance or, if she wants a change in the order, I can click on the song on the fly.

I had to discover,after trying and trying and then researching your posts, that the Song section does not follow the individual Conducter Tracks and so I was not able to use this way to organize a Set quickly as the tempos and program changes didn't work. So I'm working in the Chunk page.

The small problem I'm facing is .....when the Chunks are first loaded,the are in alphabetical order. After moving them around to organize the Set, they are mixed up totally. So if she calls for a song on the fly sometimes it difficult finding the song. Normally on the Mac in the Finder or other pages, you click on the top of the page and you can organize files either alphabetically or by dates etc. Is there a way to do this in the Chunk Page so that at the beginning of the night, I can put things in order and the move quickly to layout the Set??

It would be a great thing if we were able to have more than one Chunk page per Song....then we'll be able to save different setups for each performance.

[mhschmieder]

My mind is primarily on babysitting a five year old at the moment, so I apologize if I'm missing the question or giving a redundant answer.

You can bring up a Chunks window/panel on the left or right hand side of your main view (expand the arrow by dragging to make these sidebars visible if they aren't -- this is new to DP 7 or maybe DP6).

Just use the drop-list to switch the view from (e.g.) Event Editor, Soundbites, Audio Monitor, or whatever.

Once you have your list of Chunks, you can drag them in alphabetical order or any other order.

I'm realizing you might be looking for automatic alphabetization. I did try clicking the column header for "Name" but it did nothing. Maybe this is what you are looking for -- especially if you have more than a dozen or so Chunks and don't want to take the time to manually rearrange them?

Anyway, as many people don't know they can rearrange their Chunk order this way, I hope I'm not stating the obvious.

[sugardilly]

Thanks for your response mhschmieder.

You're right .... I was trying to get automatic alphabetization by clicking on the 'Name' header. Nothing happened.

I think this is something that DP should look at.

I'm using DP 6 and the reason that this would work for me is... I have more than 30 songs in my Chunk list.... and the singer does a different set of songs weekly. It would have been great to store 'Sets' in the Song Page as different Songs if the Conductor track situation was not a problem as it relates to Tempo and Program Changes etc.

So every week I have to find songs and place them in a specific order and then use the Chunk Chain to have them play continuously. Because I would have already 'messed up' the alphabetical order by placing songs in a specific order this week, I have to do lots of searching sometimes to find specific songs.

Please explain this... 'expand the arrow by dragging to make these sidebars visible if they aren't -- this is new to DP 7 or maybe DP6).' I don't see how to do this.

Also where is the 'drop list'.

Thanks again for your response

[sugardilly]

Additionally.... it would be GREAT to be able to highlight a group of the Chunk Names and move them all together.

[mhschmieder]

Yes, I think they should add this feature. I added it to my own app slightly over a year ago and it made people VERY happy. It can really speed up workflow.

As for the sidebars, I didn't know they were "there" at first as I used to have to bring up different m,ini-windows in the unified interface by double-clicking on a MIDI track or the COnductor track (or at least I THOUGHT I had to do it that way).

Then I noticed that the sidebars don't ever actually go away; they simply collapse from view. If you grab the edge of the unified window -- either left or right will do -- you'll notice that there are really two edges. One is the outer edge and the other is the edge of your main view (e.g. Track View). Just start dragging the inner edge and an area will start opening up, with an initial default view selected. You can then use the drop-list to select your preferred view for that sidebar.

Most commonly, I have the Audio Monitor selected on the left and the Event List or Soundbytes selected on the right. If I don't need full screen height I can even stack multiple views in the sidebar to bring up even more mini-windows. Similar technique to what I just described, but grabbing "implied" handles at the bottom or top of the sidebar panel.

I'm not sure I would have thought to try this to see what happens, as initial dragging doesn't really open up the sidebar until you've dragged a bit. But I use Eclipse as my main IDE and it behaves this way, so it occurred to me to start seeing what applications support this paradigm.

It's a somewhat recent GUI design shift and a good one, I think -- although not obvious to people who don't know about it. It keeps the screen less cluttered but makes it easier to bring back windows you use some but not all of the time, vs. older methodologies such as multiple floating windows and/or modal dialog boxes (which are "blocking" of workflow).

[bayswater]

Looks like Chunk order can only be changed by dragging them up and down.

But this might be a suitable workaround:

Order the chunks manually in alphabetic order. Now order them according to the expected playlist. Now, if you want to see them in alpha order, you can open the Undo History window, and click on the point when they were ordered that way.

[Shooshie]

I've already advised him in PM that you can set up keyboard commands alphabetically for the chunks. Further, you can set them up numerically with MIDI, then use an alphabetical chart to quickly find the MIDI key. (C#4 = MIDI 61, Ab6 = MIDI 92, A0 = MIDI 21, etc.) The numeric column is part of the Chunks window. (I'll bet most of you didn't know what that was for! )

Switching to MIDI commands from a keyboard normally used for playing is simple. You create one command for the Master Master which turns on the Masters in the Commands Window. Thus, you want a song, you hit the Master Master command, then the whole 88 key keyboard is available for selecting chunks. Heck, label the keys if you want. Use mixing board tape or something. But it's easily doable. This is not a problem. People do this all the time.

The problem is neglecting to consider other methods -- equally good -- that already exist. (you can still ask for alpha lists, but this is already there for you)

Shooshie

Incidentally, if you want a MIDI keyboard chart, I've got one from years ago which you can find here
If you prefer Middle C = C3, then you can download this one.