- Intro -
When developing musical ideas or songs it is quite often necessary to use blocks of elements that can be copied around a project and reused. Most modern songs can be condensed to fairly large building blocks of:
* instruments
* song sections
Having a structure that can represent a mixture of these groups is immensely valuable to the user as it:
* helps sketching out tracks/making demo tracks
* makes it easier to reuse the elements of a song
* speeds up making changes to the elements during the production of a song significantly
* makes it easier to utilize layered elements in a song
These benefits all stack up and help the creator:
* write better songs
* use their time more efficiently
* enjoy using the software more as they are freed from significant chunk of the manual labor
In the following image i have broken down a Zedd song called "The Middle" released in 2018 down to its "building blocks":
(Larger image with everything easier to read, please open this link in new tab:
https://i.imgur.com/I6HOQIs.png)
(Song Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj6Y6JCu-l4)
Every single colored rectangle under the song regions in the image is a "building block".
A "building block" is a group of song elements, that the creator might want to copy and reuse around the project.
They might also want to tweak one of the building blocks, and have the changes reflected to other similarly named building blocks in the project.
Why not use subprojects?
1) It is almost always necessary to tweak the elements of a song in the context of the song. Attempting this with subprojects would be like trying to open a door in another part of your house using a string tied to its door knob.
2) It would be very time consuming to do this with subprojects looking at the number of building blocks in the example provided above. It could also get very hard to manage all the projects.
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- Building Blocks-
I am not the first person to think of this feature to be implemented into Reaper. While searching i have came across lots of great threads that discuss the workflow benefits of having a structure like it, and multiple reascript developers attempting to implement this behaviour. I have linked some of the best ones below:
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread....94#post1979094 - A thread created by the user enroe, explaining the need for this feature with brilliant visuals and presentation. I would recommend reading it even if you don't care about this functionality.
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=193258 - A thread created by the user Tristam exploring the need for the functionality and proposing a similar solution, again with brilliant visuals.
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=205731 - Thread created by bFooz where he shows a script he has created that somewhat recreates folder items feature in Cubase.
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=17664 - Another thread created by beatbybit way back in 2008 that discusses the functionality.
Another thread, with a twist:
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=210354 - Thread created by vanhaze where he showcasing the wonderful script he is developing to provide structures to copy items around, further discussion about why this feature is useful in the thread.
As such i have also attempted to implement a pooled structure on top of this myself. However currently there are a couple of roadblocks that make this hard (if not impossible) for reascript developers:
There is no way to pool audio items. This means changes made to audio items in "building blocks" have to be propagated manually. A solution to develop this using a script would be:
* track changes in audio item state
* auto propagate the changes using the native action
heda has a script that does this in this thread:
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=156127
However this is really slow (if not impossible to use) when using take-FX.
I don't know what auto propagate does in the background, but if it calls GetItemStateChunk/SetItemStateChunk like mpl has stated in the thread it would explain the slowdown when using take-FX.
Another approach would be:
* track changes in audio item state
* copy and paste the item wherever necessary when a change has been made
However this is currently really hard to do. Because it is not possible to duplicate audio items using the reascript api, so you have to either:
*copy item state chunks to other audio items, this is very slow
*use native actions to copy the items around, which uses the edit cursor and distrupts the users arrange view position (and is also very slow when using take-FX)
Pooled audio items would solve all of these issues.
- Pooled Audio Items -
Here are some threads discussing the ability to pool/ghost copy audio items:
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=37097 - A thread created way back in 2009 by stk asking for this feature.
https://forums.cockos.com/showthread.php?p=1570299 - A thread created by HarryPalms in 2015 in the search for pooled audio items. The answer in the thread is propagating the changes manually. heda currently has an auto-propagate script that simplifies this process. However there are caveats with it as discussed above.
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- My Feature Request -
1) Ability to pool/ghost copy audio items
2) Pooled Media Item Groups
Media item groups already exist in REAPER, pooled media item groups combined with pooled audio items can provide all of the functionality needed for creating "building blocks". Some ideas to handle the user interaction would be:
A) The media item groups would let you assign a "parent" media item. All the other media items in the group would keep their position relative to the parent when the parent is moved, but not when the child items are manipulated individually.
The parent media item could be used to move, copy and pool copy the groups. This would let the user make tweaks to the child items in the groups, and use the parent items to manage the groups.
B) A visual box (or maybe a small rectangle) could be created above the media items like the users enroe and Tristam have suggested to move, copy and pool copy the groups. This would let the user modify the contents of the group like they modify every other media item and use the box/rectangle to manage the group.
- Personal Note -
It took me over 7 hours to put together all of this post, on top of researching other threads. I would love to hear back your opinion on it. Thank you for reading.
Building Blocks
Linear Mode
