Duplicate instances of racks...again

Now that we have the new Rack Reset functionality, it got me thinking whether it would now be possible to support duplicate instances of racks in a song, in some cases.

For example, I have a “Pedal Fade” rack that encapsulates functionality for my expression pedal, and in some songs I have multiple instances. The limit of only a single instance of a linked rack means I have to have any additional instances added to songs as embedded racks, and so I can no longer benefit from centralised updates I might make to that rack, in those songs.

These racks have no song-specific state that would interfere with other instances - they’re purely functional drop-in racks, usually just comprising of routes, filters and bindings, but most importantly, no plugins.

Is there any way we could support multiple instances of such racks in a song?

Neil

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When I create a new Linked Rack I now immediately create 4 duplicates as Symbolic Links (named with suffixes 2, 3, 4 ,5), which means I always have spares ready to drop into a song when I need them. That solves in a stroke any frustrations I had with not being able to use a Linked Rack more than once.

Any changes you make to the Linked Rack in its original guise, or any duplicate, are reflected in the other linked duplicates when you re-load their containing song. I don’t recall who told me about this trick on this forum, but I remain very grateful to them!

If I was a bit smarter with coding I could maybe rustle up a right-click utility to do it for me, but it’s not too onerous.

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It was probably me actually :slight_smile: I originally tested the idea of using symbolic links, but never went on to actually use them because I use Dropbox to sync all my Cantabile files between live/backup/studio machines, and the symlinks quickly mess up when synchronised, sadly.

Neil

I can’t speak for Dropbox, but I sync my main and backup laptops via OneDrive and I’ve had absolutely no problems at all with the Symbolic Links.

And thank you for putting me onto it - it’s been a great solution for me!

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How about this… a new command: “Insert Rack Instance” which would insert a rack from a file but not maintain the instance mapping. ie: this would become a separate instance that’s just read from the file and that’s it. It would never be saved and otherwise act just like an embedded rack, but would reflect changes from the original file.

Not sure about handling changes in the original rack - it would probably require reloading the song to pick them up.

Interesting - let me think about it. Logged it.

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That could work. I think they’d need to appear visually distinct from normal linked racks in a song, to act as a reminder that it’s “unlinked” and changes won’t be saved back. I like the idea!

Neil

I’m just a bit concerned that I would be forever making changes to the duplicate and having the changes then disappear. If I’m working on a duplicate Linked Rack then is it likely I will always want to make any changes only on the original instance? I doubt it.

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