Global Channels - feedback & wishes

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Recently I am working a lot with Global Channels and they are great. I think when polished and out of experimental phase, it will be an incredible asset and feature of vvvv to centrally manage basically most of the parameters of a software, especially those connected to UIs, controls or somehow exposed to the user.

I know a lot of things are still in development, but I would like to have somewhere to collect all the little things I notice and wishes I come across, so they don’t get lost.

I will start with a few things I have noticed:

  1. Like mentioned in another thread, it can become somewhat hard to know who or what updated a global channel. It would be great if I could monitor a certain global channel and it would log all the changes and where they originated. I see this in the … menu next to the global channel name and then it could just log the changes in the normal Debug window as Info. It should probably display a small icon, so we can tell which channels are being logged.

  2. We can already copy the path of a global channel, would be great if we could just drag&drop a global channel into the patch and it would create a globalchannel node with the path and type already set.

  3. Midi Bindings - this is a big one, as it is very limited right now. The ability to directly bind at least boolean and integer as well would be amazing. Otherwise you need these nasty workarounds where you need a float channel just for midi and then sync it to a boolean or integer, which kind defeats the purpose of having bindings in the first place. For boolean we just need a low and high threshold (or it could be 0-64 for false and 65-127 for true) and for integer you would just set a minimum and maximum. That would greatly simplify using midi controllers.

  4. Small thing I noticed in the Midi Binding window: by default the midi channel and controller are 0. I am not even sure if 0 = channel 1 or not. The fields need to have a sensible min and max, so channel goes from 1 to 16 and controller from 1 to 127. Right now you can even set negative values.

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I will add more things as I notice them.

1 Like
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Here I also noticed that you display the channel name, but it gets cut off. It should scroll or go over multiple lines. The full path in the example is:

Scene.Prompt Slots[0].Prompt.Text Prefix Dropdown.Prompt Index

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Looks like Midi Channels start at 0 and Controllers at 1!? This is what it looks like when midi learning something that is set to Midi Channel 1, CC1:

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I think naming it Midi Channel 0 is just wrong and I would class that as a bug. Midi Channels should start at 1, just like the controllers.

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Another small, but annoying thing with the Midi Binding: The window that opens is tall enough for all the Midi Binding controls to be visible, but when you set Binding Type to “Send&Receive”, the window stays the same height and the OK button is almost not visible anymore.

Could you just make the window a little bit taller, so that the OK button is fully visible, even when using Send&Receive, where it adds a row.

Also what would be really cool is if I could copy/paste a binding. Often I want to set up a Midi Controller and then for each and every one I have to select the Binding Type, Input Device and Output Device. Would be great if I could copy/paste the binding and then just change the controller number for example.

Thanks for considering!

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Another small bug I found is when a global subchannel is a spread of String.

Here I am creating a Channel with Subchannels. One of the subchannels is a spread of string. The GlobalChannel Browser now does something odd and puts this large gap in between items:

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It’s like it is leaving a gap for each item, but not displaying them. I believe it should be shown as 1 item with a dropdown for all the options.

This is in Preview 7.0-0005.

Thanks for fixing!

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One more thing I noticed: When you have 2 different files open in the vvvv editor and both of them have GlobalChannels, when you switch between the 2 files and have the GlobalChannel Browser open, it freezes the editor for quite some time (around 10 seconds in my case).

In one file I am using a GlobalChannel node with SubChannels attached to it. The datatype it is connected to is very large. Maybe it could somehow cache this, so it doesn’t have to get recreated every time you switch between files.

Hopefully this can be improved somehow. For now its actually better to open 2 editor instances and edit each file in its own instance.