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Old 05-28-2011, 09:14 AM   #1
Auralviolence
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Default "Color Selector" button menu on Tracks

Now you are constrained to go through the tracks menu each time when you want to change a color of the track. It would be nice of there would be a little button "Color Selector" on each track, pressing of which will access you to the color menu.
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Old 05-30-2011, 05:28 AM   #2
airon
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That's one idea on how to do colour selection.

There are several others. For your idea, the question is where to put it and is it truly necessary to have an extra control for this on every track.

I have two favorite methods for track colouring, one of which is in the SWS extension, and the other is what Protools does.

The SWS Extension has a function called Auto Color, which checks the name of the tracks for any patterns you've entered in its configuration. If one is detected, the track is coloured with a preset colour.

The second method, and truly my favorite, is to have a pallete of colours handy that can assign colours depending on what you've selected. Tracks or items in Reapers case.

In line with your idea, you could keep access to that handy with a toolbar button, if that kind of window already existed.


Of course you can already make a toolbar button access the colour of the selected tracks. There is after all an action to do this, because all the stuff you see in the context menu of the tracks is trigger-able with actions.

One day, users will be able to place any kind of control on the track control panels themselves, but that is a long-winded process to write a new layout(see the pre-release forum on layouts and the WALTER layout system), so in the end I think the most universal approach is to make a kind of colour pallete window like Protools has.

Whether or not this could be called up by a button on each track control panel or just a toolbar button, or a keyboard trigger is another story.

I'm not sure whether a colour pallete feature request has been placed in the issue tracker yet. Does anyone know ?
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Old 05-30-2011, 08:04 AM   #3
Lawrence
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Quote:
Originally Posted by airon View Post
The second method, and truly my favorite, is to have a pallete of colours handy that can assign colours depending on what you've selected. Tracks or items in Reapers case.
Agreed. I'm not a fan of adding buttons all over the place for things that should (optionally) always be there anyway.

As I work between these various products it occurs to me that they all eventually begin to adopt many of the same root methods and the differences literally start to become a matter of mouse clicks and mouse travel so for coloring and those kinds of things the less you have to click and the less you have to actually move the mouse cursor to color something, the better.

Last edited by Lawrence; 05-30-2011 at 08:11 AM.
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Old 05-30-2011, 11:07 AM   #4
gofer
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In this matter I found the Studio1 method very nice. You click on where the color is. Plus you can (IIRC) mousewheel between color variations.

Lawrence could you do a short, small screencap of Studio 1 color selection?
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Old 05-30-2011, 11:25 AM   #5
Lawrence
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Lawrence could you do a short, small screencap of Studio 1 color selection?
I suppose. If nobody calls me a fanboy since I'm not the one who brought it up. Give me a few minutes.

Here ya go. You basically can just roll the mouse wheel and/or move the mouse around over the popup swatch to preview colors or whatever. There is still some "travel" involved here when you're dealing with a part on the other side of the arrange window so the method still needs a little refinement.

But once the colors are up you just move the mouse over them although it doesn't seem to work from the mixer here, the auto preview thing.



Anyway, in practice I usually pick a color from the swatch thing and then roll the mouse wheel to kind roll through the shades if I don't like the current shade. Obviously, one of the better parts is there's never any dialog to close. It closes when you pick a color so it's only ever two clicks, open and pick.

Last edited by Lawrence; 05-30-2011 at 11:48 AM.
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Old 05-31-2011, 02:57 AM   #6
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FANBOI! Where is your badge, dude?





No, seriously, thanks Lawrence. What I found particularly nice there is that you don't need to visit any color dialog or swatches to dial in another shade of the color (which I like to do to distinguish between tracks of a group).
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