Hey guys! I just thought I'd share this bit of very, very, very rustic programming I made. It is meant to be used with the incredible articulation management tool that
@tack created for Reaper called Reaticulate.
If you are like me, you have a love/hate relationship with your template. I have to fiddle around with it a lot for each project and/or often need to adjust the multis, add new patches, etc. Reaticulate is (in my workflow at least) the way to manage articulations in an orderly fashion. I hate key-switches with a passion and I also don't enjoy having a template full of thousands of tracks cluttering the view, I find it terribly impractical. Reaticulate solves both problems beautifully for me.
BUT
There is a caveat to it, which is that there is no way to quickly edit banks as of now. I was a bit tired of having to go in, make sure all the UACC codes were matching the articulations, looking up icons, colors, how to write the output code, then having to write everything for each patch, read the documentation again because I forgot from the last time, etc. And I really don't want to ditch Reaper or the system, I think apart from that it is marvellous.
So I had a couple of hours yesterday and came up with a spreadsheet that does most of that grind for you, which is what I am sharing. And I know Tack is working on it and will probably implement something much more elegant than this, he has said it a few times. But I think this does okay for the time being until that comes. You can find it
HERE. You have to save it as a copy in your Google Drive or download to be able to use it.
Before I go any further allow me to first apologize to Tack and every other guy out there how knows how to code properly and now gets to look at this thing. It is not pretty. The nested IF statements in this spreadsheet will bring shame to my family name for ages to come. Most of the thinking was dedicated to coming up with a pun for the name.
In all seriousness, I imagine there is probably a better way to do this but my knowledge in this department is very limited and everything looks like a nail when your only tool's a hammer.
Usage is quite simple: Everything you see in the light blue shade in the "Patch Creator" sheet you can fill out. Everything else should not be modified to keep functionality.
The first things to add are the MSB (between 0 and 63) and LSB (between 0 and 127), which should be a unique combination for each patch as per Reaticulate's usage guidelines. The combination you choose is arbitrary and does not affect anything else, it just has to be unique. Then you fill out the vendor, library, and patch name.
The next step is articulations. There is a drop-down list for each of those cells in the "Name" column. I have included the ones that I have used the most over time, but it can be modified in the second spreadsheet of the document to whatever set of articulations you like. Choosing an articulation will automatically populate the other (initially) black columns. Currently, it accommodates up to 16 articulations.
As you add articulations you should also add a key-switch, velocities for those KSs (if you need them), the channel assigned for that KS or patch, and/or basic automation information in CCs 1 (mod wheel), 7 (volume) and 11 (Expression). The basic stuff. This is all optional, none of those are mandatory. Every combination of those parameters I have ever used works. I'm not sure if there is a combination that is impossible, usage by other people will tell. The only impossible combination that is not accepted by the sheet is entering velocity without a KS, which of course does not make sense and will provide an error message in the output section.
Now all you have to do is select and copy the code that appears in the output section (without selecting the "Output" title) and paste it into your .reabank user file using any text editor. And that's it! When you next refresh or run Reaticulate the new patch should be there.
I plan to add other optional CCs in there, where you can enter both the desired CC number AND the value to get more flexibility. But it is not implemented yet. I also want to make the KS a dropdown menu with the note names instead of having to enter the MIDI numbers. I started doing that last one but had to stop, I needed to get this done quickly in order to start a project. I will add those things as soon as I have a few hours to spare.
Although it is very rudimentary I hope it helps someone out there.
Cheers!
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EDIT: Updated to link for version 0.2. See
this post for info.