Select all shared copies

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scoox

Studio One has a really cool feature called shared copies, more commonly known as ghost/alias/linked clips in other DAWs. The idea is that if you edit any one of the shared copies, all the other shared copies are updated to match. This way, if you have a bass line that you use throughout your project, you could just use shared copies and later if you need to change a note or something you only need to change it in one place.

In Studio One, the concept of shared copies only applies to MIDI clips (or "instrument parts" if we use Studio One's weird jargon). You can tell a clip is a shared copy by the small ghost icon in the bottom-left corner of the clip:

Unfortunately, there is no way to tell which clips are linked to which just by looking at them, and Studio One doesn't provide any tools/commands to manage shared copies. In the screenshot, "CLIP ONE" and "CLIP TWO" contain the exact same MIDI notes, but can you tell if they are linked together? The fact that the color (fuchsia vs yellow) and the names ("CLIP ONE" vs "CLIP TWO") are different doesn't necessarily mean they are not linked because Studio One allows renaming and coloring shared copies of the same group differently.

This is one of those typical features that were half-implemented and never revisited again.

What is needed:

1. New context menu commands for shared copies: To enable users to select (and therefore visually identify) all clips that belong to the same shared copy group. Once selected, users can do things like delete all copies in one go, etc). The commands are:

Select all shared copies on this track
Select all shared copies

2. Select all shared copies: Same as the above two new commands, but accessed by clicking on the small ghost icon in the bottom-left corner of the shared part. Single-click the icon to select all other instances of the shared copy on the same track, double-click to select all instances in the entire project i.e. any track.

3. Rename all shared copies automatically: If any one shared copy is renamed, all other linked instances should be renamed automatically since they refer to the same data and are identical. Ideally any changes made to one shared copy (rename, color change, whatever, anything, everything!!) should be propagated to all the other copies. This keeps things consistent.

4. More about clip color: Shared copies should only follow track color if set to the default (color-less) color in the color picker. Once set to a specific color, all shared copies of the same group should use that color regardless of which track they are on.

Some more thoughts, for audio parts Studio One already provides two commands, Select in Pool and Select on Track, the latter selects all instances of the clip in the arrangement. This is very similar to what I'm requesting here (except it applies to audio events). Without these tools, shared copies are almost useless and that is a real pity.

I hope not to come across as harsh or presumptuous I'm just hoping to make my favourite DAW a little better, thanks for reading.

9 years ago

scoox

a little bump

9 months ago

alextinsley

Wow, thanks for the great detail on the feature request. If anyone else agrees or disagrees, please vote on it.

9 months ago

scoox

The current implementation makes shared copies very difficult to manage, because it's too easy to end up with many shared copies all named differently, and then accidents begin to happen throughout a project.

9 months ago

alextinsley

Thank you for the feature request.

If anyone else agrees or disagrees, then please vote it up, or down.

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9 months ago

scoox

Would be nice....

9 months ago

scoox

OK this works just fine in Reaper. Automatic name and color propagation is desperately needed, and I'm very surprised the devs didn't think about it when shared copies was implemented, it seems pretty obvious that once you have over 10 clips with shared copies of them it's going to be pretty hard knowing what's what, unless careful manual renaming practices are adopted.

9 months ago

scoox

@arturgodlewski Maybe for that there should be a "transparent" color which means clips would inherit the track color, which could then be overridden manually by choosing a specific color. This way, clips set to "transparent" would be blue on a blue track and red on a red track, and so on. It'd be great too if there was a way to "select all shared copies" for a given clip (probably a context menu command).

9 months ago

scoox

Studio One 5.1 is out, still no way to select all linked alias clips. I'm not upgrading from v4 till this is done.

9 months ago

scoox

How about include MIDI events in the pool?

9 months ago

roysonboleh

@scoox, The OP mentioned both those points.

9 months ago

januszmordak

I definitely support, this is a big problem, I moved from FL Studio, where it is so solved. How to mark all shared events to change their name and color for them, otherwise I will die in the crowd!

9 months ago

rensalle

Totally agree with the OP. When working with shared copies, shared name and appearance are just essential to the feature and I fail to understand what could have been the thought process that ended in propagating the event content but not its appearance. If there is a good reason for that, I can't fathom it. If it's just half implemented feature because of time and resource constraints, it's about time this gets fixed. This kind of idiomatic quirks are not helping getting to grips with Studio One, I can tell you...

9 months ago

scoox

Well it's been 7 years plus, so I guess this isn't getting implemented. It's sad.

9 months ago

yjlqhubl

I wholeheartedly agree with this new feature request. It's already late 2023, and I'm quite intrigued as to why this seemingly fundamental feature hasn't been provided yet. I suspect it's due to architectural limitations within the program. However, I believe that implementing this feature could attract a significant number of producers to this DAW.

9 months ago

davidchristy

This could be solved by the combining with the Feature Request to Show MIDI in the Pool, which could look like this:

Allow MIDI items to show in Pool.
New option to "Select in Pool" a MIDI Event on the timeline (same as Audio Events have).
If the MIDI Event has Shared Copies, indicate with a > expand/collapse icon, which when expanded displays all the Shared Copies and are selectable.
From the Pool - include a "Select on Track" (same as Audio Events have).

Items 2 & 4 are already implemented in the Pool for Audio, so only 1 & 3 are new requests. This would allow quick finding and selecting of all Shared Copies.

9 months ago

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Select all shared copies