Quote:
Originally Posted by airon
[...] I love the approach with the PD stuff. That would be awesome for musicians who do need it, but the entry barrier is still a lot higher than it would be with a native, easy to spot and easier to support solution in Reaper itself.
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Of course a native solution would be best. But in terms of entry barrier resulting from difficulty to install, I don't see people having entry barriers installing e.g. plugins - which is often much more complicated. That is about the level of difficulty which I think is more than reasonable to assume that aspiring users should be able to handle it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by airon
The PD approach is in my eyes the next step up from the VCA request. It's a level of customization whose adoption rate will amongst other things, depend on how quickly a beginning/intermediate/expert user can set this up.
The SWS extension is only a download away and has a manual for example. What will it take to set this up ?
A Reaper OSC map file. A PD installation(free, easy). The PD patch. Some knowledge on how to run PD. More ? The more barriers we can cut down or even just short, the more useful this becomes to more people.
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Yep, that's it basically. You don't even have to know how to set up MIDI or audio on Pd - since those aren't used it. Just the networking back and forth using UDP ports, but that's easy enough on a single system (no switch/router/wifi etc. - perhaps a pesky firewall here and there that still needs to learn how to behave).
It's only when one wants/needs to dig in to customize stuff that things become slightly more difficult. About as difficult as drawing that neat schematic picture that you posted above, I'd say. But with a bit more thought, design, and patching, things like that can also be made much more user friendly of course. Perhaps even headless.
Quote:
Originally Posted by airon
Does the Reaper Stash have an OSC category yet ?
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The ReaperOSC configuration file format is already covered, and Pd patches are (like Jesusonic patches) plain text, with a .pd extension. Easy enough, I'd say. Designing a suitable UI for 'everybody' is the much trickier part.
Pd is of course not the only available route for this approach, of course. Apart from any procedure to select tracks, this is just a *really* basic OSC configuration used with some arbitrary external process doing a *really* small number of *really* basic operations (a single multiplication on each incoming track volume value with the incoming master track value, then some operation like adding a fixed integer number to another to change the track number from dummy to slave), which could be handled in a number of ways. I'm sure someone could make much more optimized implementation of the same principle.
Or a prettier one. For example, I could hack a slightly prettier version of this up in Max/MSP in a matter of minutes that people could use with the free Max runtime, but at the cost of customizability. For some, looks are an important entry barrier as well. But not for veteran REAPER users that believe in the power of the ugly-bearded yet almighty Jesusonic!
Speaking of which, if JS could send/receive OSC messages the way control surfaces can, it would be just a matter of inserting a JS plugin, I guess. Perhaps also ask Justin for some JS/OSC interaction while Jesusonic is getting love!