chocobitz825
Senior Member
Now, S1 just ate all the CC data for expression from every instrument in this piece. I've never seen anything like it.
Yes, it’s true if I don’t have the automation lane open on an instrument that I get the behavior. My understanding from those on here though was the instruments were supposed to retain the state of the automation lanes last used in editing the instrument. That is evidently not the case...
The second thing is that some of my Spitfire instruments (especially those using the Spitfire sample player) evidently don’t use the regular MIDI CCs. In any case the parameters available in the automation lane chooser are different and “expression” for the Spitfire player is not the same as “expression” for most instruments. The upshot is that it is impossible to get the set of automation lanes under the music editor to be the same for, say, Spitfire Chamber Strings and Hans Zimmer Strings. This means that when I move from one to the other the automation configuration is always broken with S1 returning to something like a default state (generally but not always showing velocity or modulation in all lanes except modulation). In any case it just doesn’t work for that combination of instruments.
Now the problem if you are working on a large template like an orchestra piece is that every instrument has to be able to be configured the same with the automation lanes if the automation configuration is going to be retained. If any instrument can’t do this you are kind of screwed and condemned to having to reset the automation any time you jump to an instrument that can’t be configured in that fashion. This does not make for efficient work and it’s one way the editing and programming of MIDI remains a chore in S1. The program still has a long way to go...
I’ll add one cautionary tale, and that is as I was working last night at some point the expression data on all tracks just disappeared. (I was not able to reproduce the problem so I don’t know what happened.) In any case I was able to go back to a fairly recent version and recover it but that kind of bug is worrisome, and good thing I wasn’t working on deadline. Related, when I went to restore an earlier version S1 hung on closing the previous project (as it often does for any project contains a Kontakt instance—a king standing bug that I’ve reported to support and Presonus hasn’t deemed important enough to fix). It took several attempts to restore because S1 could not close the current project to open a previous one.
I love much about S1 and it’s workflow generally suits me better than Logic but the issues I’ve had the past couple of days as I’ve been working intensely with it remind me why I always end up going back to Logic for big projects involving lots of VIs.
One final question. Is there a way to open the automation envelopes created under the music editor as automation tracks in the main window. Whenever I open the automation parameter in the main window the automation envelope created in the music editor does not show up so I can’t figure out how to edit it there.
yes it seems like its does not save the state of each track's automation windows, as much as it just seems to try and retain the same view for every track. I'm honestly not sure which is better. maybe this needs to be an option in the future. For me personally, when I'm doing automation, I'm normally doing the same kind of automation for multiple tracks, so it showing the same pages all the time is helpful. However, i can see the reasoning behind wanting it to retain the same view you had it on previously.
as for automation in the main window, I never actually noticed that the two windows are not linked when you open up the automation. that must be a bug.