helgoboss / helgobox

Helgobox: ReaLearn & Playtime
https://www.helgoboss.org/projects/helgobox
GNU General Public License v3.0
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FR: FX Aliases #773

Open PucksEvilTwin opened 1 year ago

PucksEvilTwin commented 1 year ago

Related to #772 but I presume you'd want it in a separate FR.

Even with the regex enhancements to {{target.fx.name}} we still have FX names that aren't all that useful.

Unfiltered Audio for example. Every one of their plugins are named with their company before the actual plugin name

Unfiltered Audio Zip Unfiltered Audio BYOME

We need a way to tell Realearn to be able to output "Zip" and "BYOME"

You mentioned you already had an idea on how to implement FX Aliases. So I'm just making a proper FR

helgoboss commented 1 year ago

I have an idea but we can discuss the details. I was thinking about a simple static CSV which contains the mapping of original plug-in names to aliases. But we could generalize this. Maybe someone wants aliases not just for FX names but also for parameter names or other stuff. So I was thinking of something like this:

  1. One can put arbitrary CSV files in REAPER_RESOURCE_DIR/data/helgoboss/realearn/lookup/, e.g. fx-names.csv. Example content:

    "VSTi: ReaSynth (Cockos)", "RSynth"
  2. By default, these CSV files do nothing at all.
  3. But you can use them in the text expression field (or a future Lua text script): {{ target.fx.original_name | lookup("fx-names") }}

Then this could be used for all kinds of stuff.

But e.g. for above mentioned use case to always remove prefix "Unfiltered Audio", it would be even better to have rule support. Maybe by using regular expressions. Might be a bit too much for the average musician though.

PucksEvilTwin commented 1 year ago

That could work. I would personally be fine with that but let me explain what I was thinking.

A CSV is an excellent idea. To make it more accessible to the average musician, maybe

  1. Realearn creates this file itself.
  2. We had an option in the menu to open fx-names.csv in text editor maybe it looks like this by default "VSTi: ReaSynth (Cockos)", "VSTi: ReaSynth (Cockos)"
  3. If the second value is different than the first, Realearn uses that value. Maybe it could be called target.fx.alias

Now I understand that's a differerent approach and I'm not trying to say this is better or anything of the sort :)

But maybe its more accessible to the average musician.

In terms of having aliases for FX parameters. I do agree that's useful but you can already just type in textual feedback so it says exactly what you want it to say.