Studio One: What’s New In v6.1?

You can now choose custom colours for tracks and clips, and even make — and share — your own colour palettes.

We take a look at what’s new in Studio One v6.1.

PreSonus recently updated Studio One to version 6.1. It’s the first significant update to version 6 and brings with it a reasonable bunch of improvements for the Song page, Project page and Show page. There’s no startling new functionality, but there are a number of solid tweaks that are going to, in DAW developer language, enhance your workflow.

Colouring In

Let’s go straight for the most marvellous workflow enhancement of all, which is that you can now use your own palette of colours on tracks and clips. Previously, when you clicked on the colour bar on a track, clip or mixer channel, you were offered a choice of 100 or so colours curated by PreSonus. Now you can expand the colour‑choosing window to reveal a colour wheel. You can create and save your own palettes by selecting a range of colours defined by HSL (hue, saturation, lightness), RGB (red, green, blue), hex values, or just by clicking on it.

It’s precisely the sort of distraction we need right now, and PreSonus have even generated some preset options for you to consider. This feature gives you the ability to create a palette with just a handful of colours, making it much quicker to choose one. You can also share your custom palettes in the PreSonus Exchange hub, so other users can enjoy your damn fine taste.

Timecode Display

Studio One already had a timecode display, but this lived in its own independent window. Version 6.0 brought in a lot of really nice video editing features, but the timecode display and video preview still occupied different windows. Now you can have the timecode conveniently running in the bottom corner of the video display so you no longer lose track of it.

Another video tweak is that you can import video from within a Smart Template. When you choose a template from the Studio One Start page, you can drag audio tracks to the Drop Zone. You can now do the same with video files too, so that your project starts up with everything you need for your cinematic pop video.

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