[Rosegarden-user] work flow irritants
I was recently working on an audio project in RG using an existing midi as a guide track and encountered a couple of pesky issues I haven't run up against before. The midi I imported (understandably) didn't have any audio track, so I added eight of them at one go via tracks->add tracks Doing so has the unfortunate result that all of them come up as audio #1 rather than audio #1-8 as might be expected and as is the case in a new empty file. As such, they have no independent volume control and are all on the same effects bus. A suboptimal arrangement. While the solution was simply to manually change them to audio #1 through audio #8, it didn't jump right out at me until after a bit of thinking, never having come across this particular situation in my 15+ years of using RG. Is this a bug or a feature? My second irritant is that it is no longer possible to copy and paste between separate invocations of RG. I distinctly remember having done so in the past. That is to say, if I have a part in one file that I wish to paste into another, it won't do to open them both up in seperate invocations of RG and copy and paste between them (as I have done at some point in the distant past). The clipboard is not shared between the two instances of RG. Instead, I have to open one file, copy the stuff I want, close that file and open the other. Ok if it's just one copy and paste operation, but get pretty darn tedious if I want to transplant several chunks. I struggle to imagine a context in which I would prefer the current behaviour to the old one, but maybe there's a perfectly good reason for it in someone's eyes. ___ Rosegarden-user mailing list Rosegarden-user@lists.sourceforge.net - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-user
Re: [Rosegarden-user] work flow irritants
On 12/31/20 4:50 PM, steve conrad wrote: The midi I imported (understandably) didn't have any audio track, so I added eight of them at one go via tracks->add tracks Doing so has the unfortunate result that all of them come up as audio #1 rather than audio #1-8 as might be expected and as is the case in a new empty file. Yeah, that sounds wrong and should be easily improved. Will get it on the todo. My second irritant is that it is no longer possible to copy and paste between separate invocations of RG. Are you copying/pasting in the Segment Canvas (main window) or one of the editors (Matrix, Notation, etc...)? This, obviously, should work for all cases, but it will be easier to tackle if prioritized. Thanks. Ted. ___ Rosegarden-user mailing list Rosegarden-user@lists.sourceforge.net - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-user
Re: [Rosegarden-user] work flow irritants
On 1/2/21 8:42 AM, Ted Felix wrote: On 12/31/20 4:50 PM, steve conrad wrote: than audio #1-8 as might be expected and as is the case in a new empty file. Yeah, that sounds wrong and should be easily improved. Will get it on the todo. Just as a data point, the same thing happens (and has always happened) when adding MIDI tracks. If you delete everything down to just one track, and add a track with the add track icon, it's a MIDI track by default, and if you add 10 of them in a row, they all default to instrument #1. The behavior actually seems reasonable to me. I guess Rosegarden could analyze the entire composition every time you add a track, and try to assign it to some unique instrument combo, but how often would it do the right thing? Sometimes you just have to let users set things up how they want by hand. My second irritant is that it is no longer possible to copy and paste between separate invocations of RG. Are you copying/pasting in the Segment Canvas (main window) or one of the editors (Matrix, Notation, etc...)? To be clear, he's talking about separate invocations or instances of Rosegarden. One of the things that became possible after the huge rewrite and port to Qt4 was the ability to run Rosegarden more than once on the same computer. It's honestly more of a side effect of the new architecture (sequencer as a thread rather than a separate process) than something we specifically planned. Start Rosegarden, then start Rosegarden again. You have Rosegarden <1> and Rosegarden <2>. Copy something in Rosegarden <1> and try to paste it in Rosegarden <2> and nothing happens. I think I remember a time when this actually did work, but I'm not sure. I do remember experimenting with running two instances briefly, and I added up a list of issues. I think we basically just punted on all the issues, and decided not to support this formally. It's a thing you can do, but it isn't necessarily supposed to work reliably. Caveat usor. You get into issues with ALSA and JACK, which Rosegarden is which, and other things I've forgotten. Keeping config files in sync, would be an issue. Change config in <1> and change it differently in <2>, which config should be written to disk? The more I think about this kind of stuff, the more convinced I am that we all just kicked this can down the road, and didn't really do anything one way or the other. If the clipboard used to be shared, I don't know how, but it was probably working through some really nasty mechanism that shouldn't have worked, like pointers from one instance that should have been invalid in the other, but weren't, or something. Anyway, I leave it up to you to figure out where you want Rosegarden to go in this area. I'm just trying to offer some historical perspective here. -- D. Michael McIntyre ___ Rosegarden-user mailing list Rosegarden-user@lists.sourceforge.net - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-user
Re: [Rosegarden-user] work flow irritants
On 1/2/21 10:21 AM, steve conrad wrote: I have been trying to use the notation editor to paste between invocations, Ok. I've done a little digging through the code and found that we have a local "Clipboard" object that handles all copy/pastes across all editors. The goal would be to promote this to QClipboard which can handle copy pasta within and across invocations. It's an interesting project that probably belongs in the feature request list. One other minor tweak that would help me out would be if rather than defaulting to dumping all recorded audio into ~/rosegarden, audio were saved in the same folder as the *.rg file itself. If [...] the audio were automatically saved in the same folder as the *.rg, I could give each project its own folder and things would be a lot tidier. Another good idea for the feature request list. Feel free to create some entries: https://sourceforge.net/p/rosegarden/feature-requests/ Ted. ___ Rosegarden-user mailing list Rosegarden-user@lists.sourceforge.net - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-user
Re: [Rosegarden-user] work flow irritants
On 1/2/21 8:50 AM, D. Michael McIntyre wrote: On 1/2/21 8:42 AM, Ted Felix wrote: On 12/31/20 4:50 PM, steve conrad wrote: than audio #1-8 as might be expected and as is the case in a new empty file. Yeah, that sounds wrong and should be easily improved. Will get it on the todo. Just as a data point, the same thing happens (and has always happened) when adding MIDI tracks. If you delete everything down to just one track, and add a track with the add track icon, it's a MIDI track by default, and if you add 10 of them in a row, they all default to instrument #1. The behavior actually seems reasonable to me. I guess Rosegarden could analyze the entire composition every time you add a track, and try to assign it to some unique instrument combo, but how often would it do the right thing? Sometimes you just have to let users set things up how they want by hand. What happens if... you start a new RG project with all the tracks, then import the MIDI track? You should have all the audio tracks properly numbered, yes? My second irritant is that it is no longer possible to copy and paste between separate invocations of RG. Are you copying/pasting in the Segment Canvas (main window) or one of the editors (Matrix, Notation, etc...)? To be clear, he's talking about separate invocations or instances of Rosegarden. One of the things that became possible after the huge rewrite and port to Qt4 was the ability to run Rosegarden more than once on the same computer. It's honestly more of a side effect of the new architecture (sequencer as a thread rather than a separate process) than something we specifically planned. Start Rosegarden, then start Rosegarden again. You have Rosegarden <1> and Rosegarden <2>. Copy something in Rosegarden <1> and try to paste it in Rosegarden <2> and nothing happens. I think I remember a time when this actually did work, but I'm not sure. I do remember experimenting with running two instances briefly, and I added up a list of issues. I think we basically just punted on all the issues, and decided not to support this formally. It's a thing you can do, but it isn't necessarily supposed to work reliably. Caveat usor. I kind of thought copypaste track between projects had worked at one time. It's not a function I used much although it's absence seems counterintuitive. Most office apps have no problems with it. You get into issues with ALSA and JACK, which Rosegarden is which, and other things I've forgotten. Keeping config files in sync, would be an issue. Change config in <1> and change it differently in <2>, which config should be written to disk? The more I think about this kind of stuff, the more convinced I am that we all just kicked this can down the road, and didn't really do anything one way or the other. If the clipboard used to be shared, I don't know how, but it was probably working through some really nasty mechanism that shouldn't have worked, like pointers from one instance that should have been invalid in the other, but weren't, or something. Anyway, I leave it up to you to figure out where you want Rosegarden to go in this area. I'm just trying to offer some historical perspective here. -- David W. Jones gn...@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com "My password is the last 8 digits of π." ___ Rosegarden-user mailing list Rosegarden-user@lists.sourceforge.net - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-user
Re: [Rosegarden-user] work flow irritants
On 1/2/21 2:08 PM, david wrote: What happens if... you start a new RG project with all the tracks, then import the MIDI track? You should have all the audio tracks properly numbered, yes? In that scenario, the MIDI file completely replaces the existing composition, and yes, in most cases Rosegarden will construct a composition for it that has made some attempt to map the structure of the MIDI file onto the composition it creates. What you're getting at seems more like a merge than an import. I haven't used this in years. Note: the merge dialog is borked. "The file has a diffe" and then the text cuts off. Stuff like that is my wheelhouse, and I'll fix it this weekend. Note to self. Anyway, no, in fact, when you merge a MIDI file into an existing composition, every new track is set to instrument #1, and you'd have to sort that out manually, the same as if you created the tracks by hand. Whether it should work that way or not is a different matter. I'm just pointing out that's how it works now. The merge feature has always been fragile in any case. I kind of thought copypaste track between projects had worked at one time. It's not a function I used much although it's absence seems counterintuitive. Most office apps have no problems with it. Office apps don't have to interface with two totally different audio subsystems. I'm more interested in what other audio/MIDI apps do. I'm not going to explore that right now, but it's an interesting question. I've got to go make a run to take a truckload of tampons to Target (actually, I have no idea what kind of paper goods are in the trailer, and they're going to Walmart, but it was a nice alliteration), and then I might have a play with this, and just see what does what. -- D. Michael McIntyre ___ Rosegarden-user mailing list Rosegarden-user@lists.sourceforge.net - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-user
Re: [Rosegarden-user] work flow irritants
On 1/2/21 2:06 PM, Ted Felix wrote: If [...] the audio were automatically saved in the same folder as the *.rg, I could give each project its own folder and things would be a lot tidier. Another good idea for the feature request list. That one is a case where Chris and I couldn't settle on the right way to handle the typical user who doesn't have the forethought to create a directory ahead of time. The project packager was in part conceived as a way of cleaning that kind of thing up after the fact. It rounds up all the bits needed to play a particular composition, rolls them into an archive, and when you unpack it, all the bits go into a directory. I can offer as a data point that the commercial software I'm using on Windows doesn't handle this very well either. I have no idea where most of my stuff is. I've got a structure like $WINDOWS_BLATHER\Some Project\Some Other Project\A Third Project where my intention was to have $WINDOWS_BLATHER\Some Project $WINDOWS_BLATHER\Some Other Project $WINDOWS_BLATHER\A Third Project Going back into something three years later is a huge misadventure. Sad that I've been using Windows that long. I quite despise Windows, but when I bought a complicated rig for recording drums, I just couldn't run it from Linux. I can barely run that gear using the proprietary apps supplied by the manufacturer, and sure have no clue how to reverse engineer them. Alas. Anyway, this ramble is a long way of saying that yes, it would be good for an application to get this kind of thing right, and Rosegarden has room for improvement in this area! -- D. Michael McIntyre ___ Rosegarden-user mailing list Rosegarden-user@lists.sourceforge.net - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-user
Re: [Rosegarden-user] work flow irritants
On 1/2/21 3:27 PM, D. Michael McIntyre wrote: On 1/2/21 2:06 PM, Ted Felix wrote: If [...] the audio were automatically saved in the same folder as the *.rg, I could give each project its own folder and things would be a lot tidier. Another good idea for the feature request list. I did a quick and dirty recording of an idea in my studio. I figured out how to create a directory, and move the audio into it, and I thought I'd share the workflow experience as a point of reference. Step 1: I started a new project from a template. Step 2: I recorded my drum kit, producing 11 audio files. At this point, I'm sitting on "Unsaved project" or whatever. The files have gone wherever they go in this situation. Note that Rosegarden behaves differently here. We encourage the user to save the file before recording, and incorporate the filename into the audio files saved in ~/rosegarden/ as we thought that would be better than just having globs of blah-Untitled-blah files in that directory. So back to REAPER, Step 3: I go to File -> Save as new project or something to that effect, and in the dialog where I give the file a name, I also have several options to create a directory and move or copy the files into that directory. I also have options for resampling the files and otherwise running some filters on them, but I didn't explore any of that. The end product is that I have my .RPP file in the top level REAPER MEDIA directory, and a new subdirectory of the same name, into which the audio files I recorded have been moved. Rosegarden could offer something very similar, and it would be pretty easy to implement. I'd be happy to do a better job of putting together a proposal if there is any interest. My own interest level isn't that high, as I just couldn't use Rosegarden for audio, even if my audio rig worked on Linux. I'd be using Ardour. My needs are just too complicated for an application that never implemented most of the audio features it originally envisioned. Richard Bown stubbed out lots of things that just never went anywhere, and it is what it is at this late date. We decided years ago to just focus on notation, and that's there I focused a lot of my own development effort, to good effect. -- D. Michael McIntyre ___ Rosegarden-user mailing list Rosegarden-user@lists.sourceforge.net - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-user
Re: [Rosegarden-user] work flow irritants
On 12/31/20 4:50 PM, steve conrad wrote: The midi I imported (understandably) didn't have any audio track, so I added eight of them at one go via tracks->add tracks Doing so has the unfortunate result that all of them come up as audio #1 rather than audio #1-8 as might be expected and as is the case in a new empty file. As such, they have no independent volume control and are all on the same effects bus. A suboptimal arrangement. I just pushed an upgrade to the Add Tracks Dialog [e94a610a] that covers this (Tracks > Add Tracks...). You can now select the device and starting instrument and it will sequentially assign subsequent instruments. Please test latest git. Ted. ___ Rosegarden-user mailing list Rosegarden-user@lists.sourceforge.net - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-user