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Couple of questions; one possible bug

Hi Rui,

Thanks very much for all the Q-stuff presents :-) I have no idea where you find the time for all this. I'm looking at Qtractor 0.5.12 at the moment and have a couple of questions, plus one possible bug. As ever, please let me know your thoughts and whether you need any tickets etc.

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AUTOMATION ON BUSSES
Is it possible to add automation to plug-ins on busses? From looking at Qtractor and the manual it seems you can only automate tracks, rather than buses, but I'd like to check on this. I have several tracks routed through the same bus, sharing a reverb plug-in (I know I go on about sharing plug-ins all the time :-)) and would like to automate the plug-in on the bus, so that all tracks are affected. If this is not possible, what would be the "next best way" to approach it? Perhaps automate the send gain of each track's Aux Send, to increase/decrease the level sent to the bus? (By doing so, I wouldn't be able to fine-tune the parameters of the reverb plug-in, but I would be able to automate the overall level of the effect, which is what I want to do in this case).

FILES WINDOW: CLEANUP ALSO DELETES FROM DISK?
When using the "Cleanup" option from the Files window, it seems that only the "associations" with the unused files are removed; the files themselves remain on the hard disk. This can get slightly messy with a big project. Is there any way to (or plans to be able to) delete the unused files from the hard drive, from within Qtractor? I haven't used Ardour for a while, but when I last did, cleaning up the files moved them to a "dead_sounds" directory; you could then physically delete the files from here later using another option.

SPLITTING MIDI CLIP - NOTES RE-APPEAR AFTER RESIZING
I've discovered something which appears to be a bug, but it may be intentional. I'll detail it here; please let me know your thoughts.

- create a MIDI clip with a few notes in
- split the clip somewhere in the middle, so that notes remain in each of the two new clips. We'll call these clip 1 (left) and clip 2 (right)
- drag clip 2 off to the right to make some space
- drag the right edge of clip 1 to the right, to increase the size of the clip. The notes that had previously been split off (i.e. that ended up in clip 2) will re-appear, meaning that they now appear in both clip 1 and clip 2. Dragging the left edge of clip 2 to the left will also produce the same effect

Personally, after splitting a clip in two, I'd consider the notes which were split off to be "gone" so that, upon resizing the newly split clip, the resized area would be blank.
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Thanks as ever for the help.

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rncbc's picture

thanks

i'll be quick

re. AUTOMATION ON BUSSES

nope. automation is a sole feature and property of tracks; buses are not automatize-able in any way but via MIDI controllers (and an external MIDI control loop; what i and someone else once called poor man's automation:)).

re. FILES WINDOW: CLEANUP ALSO DELETES FROM DISK?

only files that were created but not in use on the current session (eg. recordings) are deleted from disk/filesystem on cleanup; otherwise it is assumed that all files are external data documents that you certainly don't want to get destroyed so easily or in any way.

however, iif the current session is stored as an archive/zip file (.qtz) then you may assume the cleaned-up files won't get into the archive upon save, thus resembling the nearest you get to a removal from disk.

re. SPLITTING MIDI CLIP - NOTES RE-APPEAR AFTER RESIZING

that's in fact working as design. you may look at a clip as being just a sliding window over an audio or MIDI file's actual contents; cutting or splitting a clip may just affect the window's position (offset) and how much wide it is (length), it does NOT affect in any way near the underlying file or its contents, see?

hth.
cheers

Thanks for the quick confirmation. Bit of a shame, but it's good to know what's intended.

rncbc's picture

shame of what, may i ask?

:-)

Apologies for the late reply, but for some unknown reason, my last attempt triggered the spam filter (even though there was no questionable content) and my ip was blacklisted from your site for a few days :-( It seems to be sorted now.

Sorry if the reply was unclear - I meant mainly that busses can't be automated. As I say, though, I can work around this in this case. For all three points, it seems they're as per design, which is fine.

By the way, I've just read your interview - very interesting. I certainly hope you don't hang up your keyboard just yet, but if you do decide to call it a day, I wish you the best in whatever you may end up doing.

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