FR - new features for racks

[Lunch Money]

OK,

When this was intially proposed a long time ago, I was one of the people saying, "Just use racks!" BUT, I think that this would come in handy if it's approached as an extension of Rack functionality.

You have a bunch of FX in your track, and you're happy with the results. But, a few things are happening: 1. Your Filter space is getting cluttered and the icon GUIs are getting rinky-dinky. 2. This configuration isn't "portable". The solution: filter groups-- ie. more options for your racks.

Using Alt+Drag, or CTRL/SHIFT+Click, you highlight a group of continuous FX. If they're not continuous, you either get an error by trying to group them, or the option simply doesn't appear. Anyhow, assuming you have a continuous group, one of the options that appears in the right-click menu or the property panel is "Group These filters". They then become a rack auto-connected in the most basic and linear way. A simple sorting/arranging algo could be developed, ie. If a plug-in has only MONO output, and the next plug-in is STEREO, the MONO would have 2 cables coming out of it, connecting to each of the next plug-in's stereo channels.

Now I can do whatever else I want with it, the way I would with a rack, because it IS a rack. I could even use it as a 'shortcut' method of getting Racks together quickly, but then once working INSIDE the rack, I could make it as non-linear as I want.

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One of my other semi-FR's (stuff I've mentioned before, but I dunno that I ever put it in a thread titled "FR") is that Rack Filters should be saveable as presets independently of the project it 'lives' in. Then you'd have access to it even if you close and delete its "root" project.

I think that this second FR is very important to begin with, but even more so with the "grouping" functionality, because people will inevitably want to save chains as "My Bitchin' Guitar Tone" or whatever, and will want to access their bitchin' guitar tone without worrying about anything except the fact that they've 'saved' it after creating it.

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Another function that could be added to any rack would be "dissolve this rack". It would just drop all the filters into the current track in whatever "order" they were originally in. If you have a super-modular-routed-crazy rack, it would just do its best to figure out in which order you wanted the filters, but I'm sure that people would KNOW that their rack is a rat's nest and if they really wanted it dissolved, they wouldn't mind just manually re-ordering and deleting filters in their track if the "Dissolve" function didn't get it exactly right.

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Greg

[koolkeys]

I agree. These would be some nice improvements. I bet it would take a bit of time to get, since Racks took quite a bit of time to get coded.

But I do like these ideas. I wish I didn't have to drag and drop each filter into or out of a rack when I change my mind about using a rack.

Good ideas!

Koolkeys

[freeztar]

Very good ideas, especially saving rack presets independently of projects. That one would be REALLY useful. Especially for a guitar player like myself because I have to reinvent my tone everytime I record, which has its benefits no doubt, but saving racks would definitly help in achieving a desired tone quickly.