Track Template Improvements Request

[Bill Phillips]

1. Track Templates create Patch Points but not Aux Tracks those Patch Points reference. Having Track Templates able to create and populate Aux Tracks (including track and PC configuration) referenced by the Track Templates output and sends. This would create and populate Aux Tracks the way Buses are created and populated now.
2. Add Bus Templates so that templates can be used to populate buses they way they are used for Tracks.

[msmcleod]

I've just tried saving a track template with an audio track sending to an aux track, and it worked fine for me - although I did make sure the aux track was in the selection when saving the track template.

[Bill Phillips]

6 hours ago, msmcleod said:

I've just tried saving a track template with an audio track sending to an aux track, and it worked fine for me - although I did make sure the aux track was in the selection when saving the track template.

Thanks. How do you "include the aux track in the selection"? I just right-click on a track and save it as a template. Also do you think that would work for a track whose output and 3-4 sends are to aux tracks? That's my situation, whole mix in aux tracks with only Master bus.

[Lord Tim]

I'd select the track and the Aux Tracks that you want to keep (so Ctrl+click the tracks) and then right click on one of them and do Save as Track Template.

And as you can see, it brings in the Aux tracks just fine:

In this case too, if there's no existing Master track, it'll bring that into the new project also.

Edited October 7, 2021 by Lord Tim

[Lord Tim]

For Bus templates, what I do is create a dummy track that's got links to every Bus I want to bring into a project (assuming they don't exist already - if they do, the new ones won't import over the existing ones). So I'd do this:

1. Add all of your busses (eg: reverb, long delay, short delay, master, etc)
2. Make a new track
3. Add sends to each one of those Busses
4. Save that track as a Track Template

On a new project, import that template, and it'll automatically add the Busses with all of the effects intact. Then just delete the dummy track.

[Bill Phillips]

1 hour ago, Lord Tim said:

I'd select the track and the Aux Tracks that you want to keep (so Ctrl+click the tracks) and then right click on one of them and do Save as Track Template.

And as you can see, it brings in the Aux tracks just fine:

In this case too, if there's no existing Master track, it'll bring that into the new project also.

It looks like what I really need to do is think of the Track Template more like a Project Template since multiple tracks will output to Group Aux Tracks and have sends to FX Aux Tracks. So what I'd do is select all tracks in the project and create one Track Template for the whole project. But that will mean that I'll need to load the project sized Track Template before importing any audio. What I'd been trying to do was bring audio tracks into a blank project and do any edits and clip automation first, and then loading Track Templates one at a time, but that's not going to work with this one big Track Template. But it might work with Buses.

[Bill Phillips]

2 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

For Bus templates, what I do is create a dummy track that's got links to every Bus I want to bring into a project (assuming they don't exist already - if they do, the new ones won't import over the existing ones). So I'd do this:

1. Add all of your busses (eg: reverb, long delay, short delay, master, etc)
2. Make a new track
3. Add sends to each one of those Busses
4. Save that track as a Track Template

On a new project, import that template, and it'll automatically add the Busses with all of the effects intact. Then just delete the dummy track.

Thanks. I've done that with Aux Tracks but not Buses. I'll try it. With Aux Tracks, I wasn't happy because some of the Patch Points broke.  Right now Buses are looking like a better alternative than Aux Tracks for Track Template development.

[Lord Tim]

 

50 minutes ago, Bill Phillips said:

Thanks. I've done that with Aux Tracks but not Buses. I'll try it. With Aux Tracks, I wasn't happy because some of the Patch Points broke.  Right now Buses are looking like a better alternative than Aux Tracks for Track Template development.

Either thing works well, but there's some advantages you get with Aux Tracks / Patch Points that you don't get with Busses, such as being able to record them easily if you want, or with project organisation if you do a lot of submixing (eg: if you do huge choirs or orchestrated music, you might find you want to submix sections to a single output, and repeat that for every other section, and then submix those to a sub-master for further processing, before sending off to your master bus) then using busses exclusively tends to turn into a HUGE lot of busses to manage, all tucked away at the bottom of the screen, and where you can't easily fold them away in sections like you'd be able to do with Aux Tracks.  If you don't do anything nutty like this, then yeah - it's really down to personal workflow which way is best for you.

I *have* run into Patch Points getting assigned incorrectly, however, but it's much rarer now than it used to be. The thing to remember is that when you close a project, it does housekeeping on any deleted patch points. So it's sometimes best to start with a project that has no patch points in it when you import a template with lots of them in there. And if you decide to delete any, save the project and re-open it before you do any more importing, just to be sure things don't get tangled.

 

54 minutes ago, Bill Phillips said:

It looks like what I really need to do is think of the Track Template more like a Project Template since multiple tracks will output to Group Aux Tracks and have sends to FX Aux Tracks. So what I'd do is select all tracks in the project and create one Track Template for the whole project. But that will mean that I'll need to load the project sized Track Template before importing any audio. What I'd been trying to do was bring audio tracks into a blank project and do any edits and clip automation first, and then loading Track Templates one at a time, but that's not going to work with this one big Track Template. But it might work with Buses.

This is generally how I do it. I'll either have 2 projects open and import my project-sized track template into one and copy the audio/MIDI tracks from the other into the new project, or I'll have everything as their own "source" tracks in a project, then I'll load up a track template, and then move the audio/MIDI data into the corresponding tracks. It's a huge time-saver when you're doing an album project because you can set up a baseline mix for everything to save all of the repetitive grunt work for getting everything into the same ballpark each time, and then you can get on with doing the actual creative work to make each track it's own thing.

[Teegarden]

+1 for Bus templates!!!

 

1 hour ago, Lord Tim said:

For Bus templates, what I do is create a dummy track that's got links to every Bus I want to bring into a project (assuming they don't exist already - if they do, the new ones won't import over the existing ones). So I'd do this:

1. Add all of your busses (eg: reverb, long delay, short delay, master, etc)
2. Make a new track
3. Add sends to each one of those Busses
4. Save that track as a Track Template

On a new project, import that template, and it'll automatically add the Busses with all of the effects intact. Then just delete the dummy track.

I always do this, but the custom colour is not retained... And on top of that you need to delete that dummy track...

Having to check each time what colour I had used for my "precious" custom Bus is a pain, especially if you have 40 or more specific Buses (I've already got 7 Buses just for for different room sizes and FX reverbs)?.

The alternative is using a template with all Buses and tracks predefined but that takes a really long time to load (even with all tracks archived on my way above average fast PC).

[Lord Tim]

Yeah, the colour thing is a known issue apparently - I've definitely reported it myself, hopefully that gets fixed sometime.  

[Glenn Stanton]

19 hours ago, Teegarden said:

+1 for Bus templates!!!

...

Having to check each time what colour I had used for my "precious" custom Bus is a pain, especially if you have 40 or more specific Buses (I've already got 7 Buses just for for different room sizes and FX reverbs)?.

i keep a printed cheat sheet of my buss/track color scheme (small squares with color, RGB#, name of buss). i only have about 30 busses so the groups of them are similar that if my overall template doesn't solve it, i can create a new custom version. although i tend to just use the main templates and trim out what i don't need rather than try to create new versions with track templates (and hopefully someday buss templates!)

[Bill Phillips]

On 10/7/2021 at 1:25 PM, Lord Tim said:

 

Either thing works well, but there's some advantages you get with Aux Tracks / Patch Points that you don't get with Busses, such as being able to record them easily if you want, or with project organisation if you do a lot of submixing (eg: if you do huge choirs or orchestrated music, you might find you want to submix sections to a single output, and repeat that for every other section, and then submix those to a sub-master for further processing, before sending off to your master bus) then using busses exclusively tends to turn into a HUGE lot of busses to manage, all tucked away at the bottom of the screen, and where you can't easily fold them away in sections like you'd be able to do with Aux Tracks.  If you don't do anything nutty like this, then yeah - it's really down to personal workflow which way is best for you.

I *have* run into Patch Points getting assigned incorrectly, however, but it's much rarer now than it used to be. The thing to remember is that when you close a project, it does housekeeping on any deleted patch points. So it's sometimes best to start with a project that has no patch points in it when you import a template with lots of them in there. And if you decide to delete any, save the project and re-open it before you do any more importing, just to be sure things don't get tangled.

 

This is generally how I do it. I'll either have 2 projects open and import my project-sized track template into one and copy the audio/MIDI tracks from the other into the new project, or I'll have everything as their own "source" tracks in a project, then I'll load up a track template, and then move the audio/MIDI data into the corresponding tracks. It's a huge time-saver when you're doing an album project because you can set up a baseline mix for everything to save all of the repetitive grunt work for getting everything into the same ballpark each time, and then you can get on with doing the actual creative work to make each track it's own thing.

I just noticed that I never thanked you for this detailed and helpful response. Thank you.