Flexi-deck Support

Logic Pro considerations

: 7 Years Ago
: Dave Bhattacharjee
: Logic Pro

With each new release of Logic Pro we find that some FD UI selection methods that previously work may now fail to find the UI element and you need to experiment to see if you can find a way round the issue. In other cases you have to have obscure approaches to get the desired results!

Version	Question/Issue - fix /solution
10.04	Question: With the mixer Window if you copy the 'reset to 0' button and set the value to -10 making two buttons with different values. Now try to click one button after the other and see if it changes the fader value from 0 to -10. Theoretically it should jump between two values 0 and -10 however, I can only achieve this if i re-select a channel in between button presses Reason:The reason is that typing into the box for setting the volume of a slider and then pressing enter causes the channel strip to no longer be focused, even though it's selected. No obvious reason why this should be the case, especially since handling the other knobs and buttons in the channel strip doesn't cause that to happen. This is probably a Logic bug. Solution: Instead of pressing enter in the "keystroke" action, have it click somewhere in the channel strip, such as the empty area right above the level meter as this is likely to be a safe spot where a click doesn't trigger anything. This was done by selecting the volume slider itself as the item to click and then setting the click's offset so that it pointed to above the level meter, since that way it should click the right spot regardless of the size of the mixer window. We have placed a comment in the Reset channel strip volume macro so that users will know why it doesn't have the keystroke action press enter.
10.04	Question: I've managed to make a plug in select that works in the mixer window (command 2) the only limitation though is that it defaults to the left most fader. Solution: There is a way to do what you're looking for, and it requires using the UI element editor and setting it to custom matching. When adding a UI element from a channel strip, look for an item in its UI element hierarchy with the name "channel strip group". That group is the one that contains all the elements for a particular channel strip. You should see an attribute for it named "focused". That attribute will be 1 for whichever channel strip is currently selected (with a caveat described below). When "use custom matching" is checked, you should be able to toggle that attribute as being a key attribute and change its value to 1 if it is set to 0. Be sure to untoggle any attributes that apply to that specific channel strip (such as its "description" attribute which is typically the channel strip's name). You'll also have to do the same for each element in the hierarchy. For example, I had to untoggle the "title" attribute on the item in the hierarchy for the window itself, since otherwise it'll only work for the specific Logic project you have open! Once that's all done, try turning on "highlight match from hierarchy" and selecting different channel strips -- the highlighted element should move to whichever one you've selected. The caveat I mentioned earlier, though, is that each channel strip group's "focused" attribute will only be 1 when that channel strip is selected and when the mixer window is active. So if for example the main window or the piano roll window is active, none of the channel strips will be marked as "focused" and your macro won't be able to find the UI element it wants. So to work around this, you can have a "focus window" action at the start of the macro and tell it to focus the mixer window. You can do this using a recent feature added to Flexi-deck where you can hold the option key while selecting a window for the "focus window" action and have it match by looking for the window containing a specific UI element, such as the "tracks" button at the top of the mixer window. (Before this feature was added it wasn't possible to make an action that would focus the mixer window specifically!)