Can I easily switch between state-specific and song-wide editing?

Cantabile
1

I just upgraded from Solo to Performer, because I needed to use Song States in a few specific scenarios on a couple of songs in my set list.

They’ve worked well for that purpose, however…

On the couple of songs where I’ve added song states (verse, chorus, bridge etc) I go in to make song-wide changes, like adding new routes or plugin volume changes in the graphical view, and I forget that the “verse” song state is highlight by default. So I think I’m making song-wide changes, but I then play the song, and my changes disappear when it switches to the chorus - it’s super frustrating! I feel stupid! So I have to be really careful to remember whether I’m working on a song that has states (only 2 songs), or ones that don’t (14 songs), and remember to work in a different way.

What I think would be better, IMHO, would be to have a special “Song Wide” global state as the first entry in the “States Window”, and for this to be the default state when a song is loaded. This would mean that any changes I made would apply to the whole song by default, then if I want to make some state-specific changes to a few select plugins, I can select the appropriate state and make those specific changes. I have found that I make way more song-wide changes than state specific ones.

Another bonus of this approach, is that the normal (song-wide) editing behaviour of both songs with and without states would be the same, until I explicitly select or add a specific state in the States window.

Right now, every time I want to make song-wide changes I have to remember to individually select any plugins & routes I’m going to work on, and untick all their states in the State Behavior window, which really slows down my workflow, and I keep forgetting to do it!

An alternative solution would be for all the “State Behavior” items to be unticked by default, which would effectively make all their changes song-wide by default?

2

Hi @petehughes

There’s no concept of song wide editing, but take a look at State Behaviours, which let you specify which attributes are per-state and which are song wide.

Also, if you make a change to a setting that you want propagated to all states, you can right click on the state bahaviour and choose Update All States.

Does this help?

Brad

3

Thanks Brad, that helps a lot, I think that solves my problem for any new songs I create, or new plugins / routes I add to existing songs.

So, I’ve found the setting to set “default states”, and I’ve set the default to be “all unticked” on these types of objects:

  • Plugins
  • MIDI Routes
  • Audio Routes

So any new items I add of the above types are now all “stateless” by default, thank you.

However, all my already-created songs are full of existing plugins and routes, and I can’t find a way to select all, or even ones of the same type, and disable their “state-fullness” all in one go. i.e. if I multi-select plugs/routes, even of the same type, the State Behavior" window is empty. I thought I might have shown the common Behaviors when multi-selecting.

Instead, I have to select each plug-in individually and then untick all its states in the “State Behavior” window. Is there an easier way to do this?