Performer Notes

DP's new Undo History can take you back through every stage in the development of your tracks.

Unlimited Undo/Redo was one of the most eagerly anticipated new features of DP 3.1 and its implementation is, in true MOTU style, very flexible and highly user-configurable. Inevitably, though, it has come at the price of added complexity, and there's something about time-line-based operations like Undo that every now and then ties all but the brains of seasoned Starfleet captains in knots. So here, hopefully, is a simple, non-nerdy guide to this great new feature.

Taking a project from start to finish consists of a series of actions — recording tracks, editing, moving faders, applying effects, bouncing and so on. It might take an hour or a year, but either way there's a finite number of individual actions involved in getting, as it were, from A to B.

Previously you could undo (or redo) only one action — the most recent — in Digital Performer. Now DP makes a list of all your actions, and allows you to step back through them as far as you like. If you've never felt the need to undo more than your most recent action, you'll be pleased to hear that not very much has changed — Command-Z is still Undo (one step). By hitting it again you'll Redo the action.

However, if you, like me, often wish you could go back more than one step, the new shortcut Option-Command-Z will do the honours. Every time you hit this you're undoing another action in the Undo 'history'. And if you need to Redo those actions, Shift-command-Z is wh

More Enhancements In v3.1     Tap Pad The Tempo Control pane in DP's Control Panel has a new mode, selectable from its pop-up menu. 'Tap Pad' puts a button in place of the Tempo Slider, which can then be clicked repeatedly (preferably when the sequence is stopped) to establish the tempo of the sequence. All good stuff, but you'd do even better to remember a similar keyboard shortcut, 'Tap to Enter Tempo', which by default is the forward-slash key. The great thing about this is that you can tap it to establish a tempo even when the Tempo Control pane isn't set to Tap Pad. It works just as well in Tempo Slider mode, and once you've tapped in a tempo you need only hit Return to enter it or Escape to cancel it. Even better, the same technique works for entering a tempo in any appropriate dialogue box or window. For example, in Change Tempo (in the Change menu) you need only click once in a tempo field (to select it) and then start tapping the forward-slash key to enter the resulting tempo. Edit Resolution DP's Edit Resolution functions have improved. With the overall Time Format set to Measures, Edit Resolution pop-ups (in windows such as the Graphic Editor and Sequence Editor) now have dotted, double-dotted and triplet versions of all the main 'mensural' time units. This, allied with the ability to display the edit grid ('Show Edit Grid Lines' in Editing windows' mini-menus), makes for a much more powerful visual editing environment than ever before. When the Time Format is set to something other than Measures, editing windows get a new Edit Resolution pop-up with some pre-defined choices ranging from 0.01 seconds to one hour. There's also a new text field alongside, showing the exact Edit Resolution in the prevailing time units, allowing you to define exact edit resolutions in Real Time, Samples, or Frames (timecode) format.

Sometimes, though, you'll need even more help, which is where the Undo History window comes into its own. Called up with Control-Apple-U (or from the Edit menu), this window is where you can view every single action you've taken in developing your project. Actions are listed chronologically, with a brief description (under the Name column) as well as a record of the time they took place, the amount of RAM DP is using to 'remember' them, and, when applicable, the amount of disk space they're taking up. The current state of the project is reflected by the position of the dot in the 'Now' column, and you can undo to any previous point by double-clicking in this column next to any action you choose. For clarity, any undone actions are highlighted in the list.

If you choose to jump back, say, 100 steps, you're basically turning back time and restoring the project to an earlier state. You can then develop it in an alternative way, effectively creating a brand-new history for the project. And this is the clever bit — DP supports 'branching', meaning that as well as writing a new Undo history for whatever you now do, the previous 'alternative' history is also remembered, on a separate branch. You can investigate and manage multiple branches at will, and we'll look at this in a moment. Before we go any further, though, there's one important thing to be taken into consideration. In the words of Scotty, 'ya cannae change the laws of physics...'

Here's what I mean: imagine you record a few vocal takes and delete all but one that you choose as the best. You then do another month's work on the project, taking it to a state of near-completion, before wondering if that first vocal take wasn't the best after all. It would be nice to think you could jump back, select one of the alternative takes, and restore everything that you did afterwards. But that's not possible, and never will be, because it assumes that DP could intelligently adapt later actions to suit the change you made. There'd be naming, location and timing disparities amongst other things, and DP would somehow have to guess that any edits made to your original soundbite now apply to the new one. It couldn't happen, because you've changed something to which later entries in the history refer — and this is just a simple scenario! But before you lose faith in the power of unlimited Undo let me just say that there are ways around this issue, which I'll be looking at next month.

OK, now to put some of this into practice. Create a new project, record a few MIDI or audio tracks, and make one or two edits. Open up the Undo History window and you'll see a list of your actions. Double-click in the Now column, next to the last recording, before you did the edits. If you've got any editing windows open, you should see the edits you made disappear. Now change the sequence tempo

DP, left to its own devices, will maintain an unlimited number of branches, including branches off branches, and branches off branches off... you get the picture. It can all be a bit overwhelming, especially if you choose the 'All Branches at Once' View option, which discards the branch pop-ups and literally shows every single action in all branches in the same window. Here, single branches are

There's one thing that can really help to maintain your sanity — the Undo History time-line. This appears at the top of the Undo History window and gives a clear indication of when single actions took place, by displaying them as black vertical lines underneath a time-line helpfully referenced to 'real' time (ie. the 24-hour clock) and, when necessary, calendar date as well. The current state of the project appears as a green line within the time-line itself.

The time-line really helps on several fronts. First, if you start ploughing through multiple branches of history in search of something particular it's all too easy to actually get lost and forget how to return to the most recent state of the project. With the time-line it's easy — roughly decide what time it was when you started searching and find a vertical black line near that time. Then click on the line. It becomes highlighted, as does the action it represents in the Undo history. What's more, all the necessary branches and sub-branches that lead to that action are selected. The time-line also comes into its own if you want to undo a relatively large number of actions, and means you need only think about what time (on what day) you want to return to, saving you having to wade through hundreds of actions possibly buried in separate branches.

The time-line has a couple of little zoom buttons to the right of it, though an easier way to zoom is to click in the lower bar (with the black vertical lines) and drag vertically. The zoom range stretches from individual seconds, through a few minut

Current Version     Digital Performer 3.11 (with MAS2.4 and FreeMIDI 1.48)

The ability to undo a year's worth of work comes with a trade-off: storage space. A single Undo history can use up monstrous amounts of RAM and hard disk space, and for large audio editing jobs, in particular, things get impractical very quickly. Projects become impossible to backup or archive, except onto dedicated hard drives! Managing an undo history is what the 'Pruning Preferences' are all about, as well as the 'Flush' commands in the Undo History window's mini-menu. More on this in next month's 'Project Management Special Edition' of Performer Notes!