(MINI TUTORIAL) setting up a template edit ...

[pHz]

edit by valley : stickied.

i threw this one together to help someone out over at the mackie forum ... its a question that pops up from time-to-time when people cant find the SAVE THIS EDIT AS A TEMPLATE option and so it might be worth posting here too ...

1 - create a new project / edit and set up your inputs / track names / plugins / MIDI mappings as required ...



2 - switch to the PROJECTS tab ... select the current edit and click the EXPORT EDIT button in the properties panel ...




3 - in the dialogue box that pops up ... set the options as in the image and click on the ... button to browse to a folder to save the archive to ...





... thats your 'template' edit set up ... all you have to do each time you want to re-use it is ...



1 - create a new tracktion project as you normally would ...



2 - click on IMPORT MATERIAL in the properties panel and select UNPACK AN ARCHIVE AND ADD IT TO THIS EDIT ...



3 - browse to where you saved the 'template' .trarch file and load it ... the edit should appear on the PROJECTS tab ready to be opened as any other edit ...





... lather ... rinse ... repeat as required ...

CAVEAT ... just noticed that any inputs you set up DONT seem to be saved (at least with PER-TRACK INPUTS disabled) ... so these will need to be reset each time you re-use the template ...

slainte rob

[Beardedone]

Good one Rob! Thanks.

Gordon

[Mr. Tingle]

Tried it, works a charm, thanks!

[rpc9943]

note: do not do export project for this. I made a mistake when I did.

ROnC

[pHz]

thatll be why i put EXPORT EDIT in bold letters and the big red circle thingy around the EXPORT EDIT button ron ...

slainte rob

[djsubject]

PS. fab tutorail phz

only problem is i never use the template i made

Subz

[naturestoned]

I think I found a way to improve the very good post of pHz a little bit.

If you make a template edit archive like described above you just have to copy a link to the archive on the Desktop. You can also define a shortcut for this link (Ctrl+Alt+T in my case).

If you now click this link T2 starts and directly asks where to unpack the archive. I just enter the name of a new subfolder in my Tracktion Projects Folder, rename the project and start to work....

Greetings alltogether by a very happy new T2 user

[Lunch Money]

Great one, ns! Welcome to your Tracktion years.

[mle]

Last night I learned the hard way a serious danger of using template edits as described above.

If you unpack a "template archive" inside a project for which you already have another edit generated from your template, it will actually overwrite the existing edit in your project and you will LOSE ALL YOUR WORK! This is because all edits generated from a template share the same filename.

So using archives as templates is unsafe, and you risk losing data. Tracktion should have a proper template solution, but it does not. This workaround is not satisfactory.

[Lunch Money]

Thanks for the warning, however the conclusion isn't logical.

For people who only need the first edit of the project to be based on a template (and all subsequent edits in the project would likely be variations or shadows of this first one), the solution is satisfactory, indeed.

I maintain from an earlier thread on the subject that templates in general aren't even needed in Tracktion.

Greg

[mle]

You might not feel the same way if you were the one who had lost hours of work :).

Not everyone organizes their projects so that all edits are variations of the starter edit. Also, when you're working on many edits in many projects, you might not even remember whether a given project contains an edit based off of a given template.

The thing that makes me the most irate is that when I opened the template in a project already containing an edit based off of that template, Tracktion asked me whether I wanted to overwrite the existing edit. I responded NO, and yet it still went ahead and overwrote the edit. I suppose that's just a downright bug, but it turned out to be a very costly one to me.

[multree]

well it would honestly be easier if T had a mode where T would start with preferd settings wouldn't it.....

but it's a good workaround...

nice one teach

[Rock]

Sheewiz, are "real" templates that hard to add? That seems like a task a good programmer could knock off in an hour or less. Hope they fix mle's discovered bug as well.

[pethu]

Sheewiz, are "real" templates that hard to add? That seems like a task a good programmer could knock off in an hour or less. Hope they fix mle's discovered bug as well.

Yes, this needs to be addressed: The way it works is counter-intuitive and downright destructive. The basic problem is that whenever an edit is first created, there's is a project-unique ID stamp imbedded in its definition file, which isn't altered whatever you do to it (move it between projects, unpack it in a new project, rename it within tracktion, copy it outside Tracktion, whatever).

I guess to many people a "project" is a single song or edit, in which case there this is no problem.

To me (for a lot of reasons, including sanity and plain semantics ) a project is an album, or music for a revue, etc., in which case this bug/deficiency comes back to bite you again and again. And with no way to save remote CC mappings at a global level, there is no way to get around the need for a functioning template.

The best I could come up with is this, which is really awkward:

1. Set up and CC-map an edit that will become your template.

2. Save the edit in an out-of-the-way template folder.

3. When you need a new edit, copy the template edit file to the project folder.

4. Create a new, empty edit in Tracktion.

5. In Tracktion, re-link that edit to point to the template file. Rename edit and file as desired. This seems to re-stamp the edit with the new unique ID in a proper way.

6. Delete the original edit file created in Tracktion in step 4.

[Lunch Money]

Surely it can't be THAT pervasively horrible and counter-intuitive if the community's not up in arms over it. I've never once needed a template, and I've never once looked for the feature. And I'm sure I'm not alone. That doesn't mean that the request is silly or should be discarded-- on the contrary, I think it'd be another addition that could ONLY improve Tracktion and I can't imagine any possible way in which it'd be a step backwards.

However, I think that you're overstating the case, probably because of the emotional response you had to losing an edit.

There's only so much that ANY app can do for you, and then as a user we have to take a certain amount of responsibility. I know that pressing "save" in Word (or any other app) will update the document I'm working on with the current changes I've made since opening. I don't expect the "save" button to function as a "save as..." each time I press it. This template edit tutorial was written as a workaround, and I think it was assumed that a person only needs one "starting point" template per song. I can't imagine needing more than one, but hey, everyone works differently. The point remains, however-- it's explicitly a workaround, meaning that as a user you have to evaluate it and decide if it suits your needs. Skipping that step can't be blamed on the person suggesting the workaround, nor on Tracktion itself.

Again, I'm not saying the idea of templates is a bad one. It can ONLY be a useful one! But when there's a list of 50 pet requests that people think are "easy to implement", suddenly the developers are faced with a formidable list of features that people want to see added, in addition to any bugfixes or overhauls of existing functions. It's never as simple as we think, and not everybody's priorities and needs are the same as our own.

Greg