Reaper action frequency analysis

[ryancacophony]

I've been a Reaper user for a few years now, and I'm constantly telling myself that I'll learn more shortcuts/make more macros *some day*. But generally when my nose is to the grindstone, I'm not very prescient of what actions I perform repeatedly (especially ones that require a lot of clicks). I doubt this feature exists, but I figured I'd ask anyways:

Is there any way to record statistics on reaper actions in order to determine the most frequently used actions?

The idea here is to programmatically analyze the most used actions in order to provide a suggestion list of actions that you would best benefit from either learning the key shortcuts, or making a macro for.

Actually, if you have a pretty long undo file, I feel like this analysis could easily be done retroactively, if the undo file is in an easy to parse format.

Thoughts?

[serr]

Originally Posted by ryancacophony

Thoughts?

I want the computer to identify patterns when I'm working and take over and finish the task automatically.

eg. Start strip silencing a tom track. After the first couple rounds of groups of strip silence with little manual interventions as that usually goes, Reaper identifies the patterns I'm looking at and finishes the job.

Start editing esses out of a parallel vox track (because I decided all the deessers were garbage today or something)... see's the pattern after 2 or 3 and takes over.

Then a little message "Is this work correct? OK Cancel"


When are we going to be here with AI?

[ryancacophony]

Originally Posted by serr

When are we going to be here with AI?

I mean, that is the field I work in on a day to day basis, so bingo I was actually going to suggest a markov-esque approach like you mentioned where, given a big enough list of data, you can start to analyze event chains.

Not sure if you're being tongue in cheek, but macros are all about being lazy, so why not optimize/aid your identification of problem areas? It's the same approach programmers take to making code run faster :P

[ryancacophony]

I did some quick analysis via command line (mac) and found a quick and dirty approach to start:

grep UENT ./test-undo.RPP-UNDO | cut -d '`' -f2 | sort | uniq -c | sort
   1
   1 Copy media items
   1 Move media items
   2 Add New Track
   2 Change media item selection
   4 Add Media Item via Pencil
   4 Adjust Media Item Fades
   5 Resize Media Items

A sorted list of the most common actions in the file, ie I "resized media items" 5x, etc

The undo formatting is pretty simple and it seems that the reaper list only reads UENT events, although I did notice a few other things in the undo file, not sure how much of that should need to be parsed

[serr]

Originally Posted by ryancacophony

I mean, that is the field I work in on a day to day basis, so bingo I was actually going to suggest a markov-esque approach like you mentioned where, given a big enough list of data, you can start to analyze event chains.

Not sure if you're being tongue in cheek, but macros are all about being lazy, so why not optimize/aid your identification of problem areas? It's the same approach programmers take to making code run faster :P

Tongue in cheek in that I understand I'm asking for the moon (at least in the way I stated it) but absolutely serious at the same time in wanting an "intelligent smart tool".

You can recognize patterns when you get into certain tasks. There's a level of complexity that goes beyond writing a quick macro but the pattern is there. Seems like a reasonable expectation to see this evolve.

[ryancacophony]

Yeah, looking at the undo file it seems there is a cursory level approach like I had, but there is definitely room for improvement/advancement (ie analyzing how much you resized as opposed to just considering all resizes the same). For example I'm sure I resize a lot of tracks, but I bet if you drilled down you'd most commonly find me resizing 2x/0.5x.

If there was some documentation, it'd be a fun project to work on. I might see if I can make something cross platform for the cursory analysis. At the very least it would provide a place to start, and a human can extrapolate with regards to whether things are happening as a chain of events.

[obogz]

I know there is a script that manages your undo history, witch contains a list of actions. Maybe that script can store the history in a database or something and show statistics of all the used actions.

[blandopazzo]

that would be very useful

[gkurtenbach]

I asked about this type of thing in the develop forum:

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=269094