Maybe a “Restart Automation and/or Scroll” feature.

[Neill00]

I find “restart current song” invaluable but it occurred to me that what would be better would be “restart Automation”. The main reason I use “restart current song” is to restart the lyric scroll. I don’t necessarily need to resend all the midi info in fact there are circumstances in which resending it will undo some changes I make to some of my devices on the fly.  Personally I use the automation to control the lyric scroll but I suppose this feature could be linked to the scroll then it wouldn’t need to be an either/or.

Perhaps there is already a way to accomplish this but I haven’t discovered it.

[arlo]

Since automation tracks change various states of the song (like the scroll position or recording playback), you need to reload the song to reset everything so the automation track can start again.

If you need to restart auto-scrolling without resending your MIDI or resetting other things, you can click the document button, manually scroll the lyrics to the top and then click the document button again. Alternatively, you can just manually scroll the lyrics to the top, in which case they will begin scrolling immediately, without the pre-roll.

[Neill00]

I’m not sure I fully understood how the automation works or how it would affect anything the automation differently if it was only the automation that restarted or if the whole song restarted. Having said that, there may be another way around this that I didn’t think of but may be exactly what I need.  I’ll test it out but if I changed my remote control button on my footswitch from “restart current song” to “start automation” would it restart the automation from the top each time I tap it? Even if I have the automation set to be triggered by song start as well?

[Neill00]

My experiment didn’t work.  I set the remote control to start automation but if the automation is already running and I hit the foot switch for “start automation”, it stops the automation and restarts it on the second press.  I don’t know why because there is an option for stop/start automation.  Is this maybe a bug.  If I assign the “previous page or marker” to the same midi message it will bring the document back to the top so if I could get that start automation to work as expected I would be in business I think.

[arlo]

I agree, the behavior is confusing if the automation track is already running and you call the Start Automation function again; that acts like a toggle now and should just do nothing in that case.

If you want to restart the automation, you can call the Start/Stop Automation function twice. It will stop and then start from the beginning, not where it left off.

[Neill00]

Thanks Arlo, I see how it works now.  In essence, “start/stop automation” is my requested “restart automaton” with one extra button press.  If I understand your previous post, there are some properties inherent to the way automation works that require it to be stopped before it can be restarted.  Or perhaps, it’s to do with the remote control, that you can’t program both actions to work with a single press? 

[arlo]

It's not that an automation track must be stopped before it's restarted; it's that typically you have to reset the state of the song so the automation track is working with a clean slate when it restarts. So a function that just restarts the automation track and does nothing else would have limited usefulness.

[Neill00]

Right, so for my purposes is also have to set the remote control to send the same midi message to also control something like go to Previous marker and set up a marker at the start of the song… or something along those lines.  Since the automation on its own isn’t going to bring the lyrics back to the top if they’ve already started scrolling.  Thanks for taking the time to walk me through it…

[arlo]

Actually you could add an initial event to your automation tracks that scroll the lyrics to the top. Usually that's redundant because the lyrics are at the top by default when you select a song. But in your case that would reset the lyrics position if you restart (stop and then start) the automation track.

[Neill00]

So it suddenly dawned on me that I have a RJM Mastermind GT which can do some pretty awesome midi stuff.  One of those being that I can program into a footswitch a "wait".  So my solution became, program the midi command to activated the "start/stop automation" then a "wait" command of x milliseconds followed by the same "start/stop automation" midi command and presto, along with your idea of using the "scroll lyrics to line 1" automation command, I have my restart automation.  It works perfect.

[arlo]

Okay, that's cool!

[arlo]

In today's app release, triggering the Start Automation function when an automation track is already running will do nothing.