Okay, here's a simple proof of concept. Check out this little
demo video (7.7mb .mov file, 1:51 min.), and if you feel adventurous, check out this
.zip including all the stuff I used (save REAPER and Pure data extended
).
Since I'm using dummy tracks for each VCA slave track, the ease of setting it up will depend on what sort of scheme you'd use for pairing dummy track numbers to slave track numbers. One could for example use slave = dummy + 1 to have them show up in the MCP/TCP in pairs. I used a simple slave = dummy + 8 scheme here, with tracks 2 to 8 as dummies for tracks 10 to 16 as VCA slaves, track 9 being the VCA master (I skipped track 1, to have the master track in the middle for ease of illustration). If it sounds complicated, just watch the video.
It can of course be easily extended with mutes, sends/receives, whatever. So can we stop discussing VCA and start talking CV?
PS: oops, forgot to show scrubbing, which also works quite well.
(PS2: in the Pd patch, the stuff at the top are LFO's for testing, and the toggle button labelled MUTE doesn't do anything - it's just a reminder to add that, too. You can just rip this stuff out if you like, of course.)