While the UI is very powerful it can become somewhat slow to add lots of controllers, their definitions and the logic items for each one. I would love it if we had a way to export the current setup of the plugin (preset?) to a file and also be able to import from a file. This file should be plain text and not binary.
Primary Benefit: Quick edit of similar controllers with a regular text editor. Copy and paste a few lines and modify one positional element instead of multiple clicks on the UI.
Secondary Benefit: Publish common controllers setup. I could post my Acorn Masterkey 61 layout ready to be used in AZM with minimal knowledge of the plugin
Style points: make the exported file somewhat human readable
Thoughts?
Import/export is planned, but it is not on top of the list. If you check the number of users, you can see why ;)
Also just adding 50 controls takes like 5 minutes. What takes time:
- Assign controllers to MIDI events. Since most controllers are configurable, we can not assume it is "default". Device SysEx to auto recognize current configuration is normally not documented, and it is really device model specific. But still, that takes yet another 10 minutes.
- But what each control does, is a real challenge. For each such "preset", someone will have to write XX pages documentation how it works. In fact that is why most ACT MIDI newcomers are frustrated, they have hard time to understand how it is organized (it is more or less described in SONAR documentation, but who read it...).
Current presets are in binary form (SONAR saves presets of all plug-ins in separate files). Making them text readable will add yet another "interpreter" to my 15k lines project. For my own configurations, "Copy"/"Paste" for actions is acceptable compromise. Do not forget that the configuration is much more complicated then plain table, I will have to use something like XML then. I had such idea, but at the beginning only.
So effectively looking at binary export/import at some point. That's acceptable, at least I can setup my instruments the way I want them and store the settings away for backup purpose.
I do totally understand focusing on functionality first and UI friendliness later. Looking forward to the new version :)
All presets are saved in <User>/AppData/Roaming/Cakewalk/Shared Presets/xxx.
There are also other system wide files, which are easy to mess with (ACT Data for example). So "Roaming/Cakewalk" is a good folder to backup.
CakeWalk plug-in manager can import/export presets, single or as a bundle.
regarding import/export, is it possible to copy a single setting from one preset and paste into another one??
i have just found AZ Slow and it's simply wonderful, perfect!
i had a look at the existing presets, and I have found several actions that could be interesting, maybe one button in a preset, another one in another preset... is it possible to "combine" them in a third preset??
the copy/past function seems not to work if i change preset... or do i miss something?
thanks!
Sorry but no. AZ Controller internally works with "compiled" preset code directly, it is not possible take some part out of its context (that is why there is no "text import").