Just wanted to gauge interest in my latest idea. It’s already implemented but to see if I should make it public.
I’m a person suffering from severe mixer-itis as you can see. It’s quite annoying to route all my parallel effect chains to mixers and I run out of mixer ports. I tried to make a larger mixer plugin with more ports but it was only marginally better.
Until I thought, why shouldn’t I just have a final System Mixer which is what I really want and just right-click on a plugin to send its outputs to the System Mixer directly which sends the outputs to the next free mixer input on a 16-channel stereo mixer. The mixer plugs directly into the stereo outputs of the Dwarf.
Internally what it does is that once you click send to mixer it adds to your pedalboard a hidden “System Mixer” plugin (which I guess would have to become official and default if this UI feature makes it to official) and “teleports” the cables there.
Yes it’s a normal lv2 DPF plugin, it has a fixed number of ports (16 stereo channels in , a stereo out). Unused channels are skipped so they cost close to nothing. It also autodetects if the input is stereo or mono, so the mono is sent to both L/R.
The mod-ui fork I made is only needed to hide the specific plugin, add the top mixer in the menu, and autoconnect it to the output, otherwise it would be the usual cable mess.
I personally prefer to see cables rather than have some magical invisible routing happening.
That said I still have a draft of a bigger mixer with send effects that I want to finish some day, and will likely be enough for my own usage and overcomes the limitations of the current mixers.
Not sure about the dropdown as a control surface, but the idea of a mixer “growing” based on the amount of sends is super interesting.
From a UX perspective I think @dreamer has a good point as it would introduce a signal chain processing step outside of the canvas, which is a clear departure from convention. Since the canvas is html though it could expand/contract on the canvas itself? Cheers
Well since there were objections on my UI changes, I made it a standalone plugin so it can be installed directly on MOD. But if you want the cable teleports you will need Starless installed
It’s kind of crazy, but a bit scary as well the amount of stuff you can do through a plugin, in the context of modifying the UI. For example the plugin modifies the UI to add the right-click “Send to mixer” command. As you can see the plugin grows with increasing number of sends and autoconnects to the outputs as well on the first send.
@StefanD yes, all of my touchscreen OS development is purely supplemental to the MOD OS. It installs as a non destructive script.
I think actually extending the idea of what a “plugin” is for MOD could be quite interesting. Like a base OS that can be extended with certain functions.
This is why some beta plugins would cause UI glitches/issues. All the UI runs in the browser in the same DOM.
So that’s why we need to test and vet every plugin UI carefully to make sure it doesn’t do anything “illegal”.
One could argue that your plugin modifying the UI like this is not according to spec of course. Maybe there should be a more official API for doing these kinds of changes.
