Pressing Play/Stop and Melodyne

[DanielTT]

Other plugins don't suffer from this. I can turn the knop an EQ plugin, and the spacebar will still work without having to click the edit window first. 

Sorry, I'm not familiar with Melodyne but does Melodyne itself need the spacebar for some particular purpose? If so, that might explain why Melodyne captures the spacebar when other plugins don't...

[Edit...] According to Celemony's web site their stand-alone version of Melodyne does make use of the spacebar. So my guess is that the plugin version is still intercepting the spacebar - even when it doesn't need to (i.e. it's capturing spacebar presses but then just ignoring them...) Maybe an email to Celemony's support team?

You can assign key commands to the melodyne plugin, i made sure that spacebar is not mapped to anything. But you’re right, melodyne probably still intercepts the key strokes. However, I thought that that would be disabled with the keyboard switch you have in the plugin window.
And all other daws don’t have a problem to start play when pressing the spacebar. Eventually I can sent celemony an email, but as explained earlier for me it is more logical to see what harrison says first….

[DanielTT]

DAWs that implement ARA (e.g., Reaper, Logic, etc.) behave much more seamlessly with Melodyne; maybe the issue you're describing boils down to the fact that Mixbus doesn't have ARA?

I haven't even tried using Melodyne as a plugin in Mixbus; I export my stems, work with them in standalone Melodyne, export them from there, and reimport them. Sounds convoluted but it's not actually much work. I do use Melodyne as a plugin in Reaper (which has ARA) where it's well integrated with transport.

I’m afraid that that workflow won’t work for me, I need to hear the context of the instrument with the other instruments…. And about ara… ara is great for 3 minute songs, but I record live sessions which might span more than 2 hours. I once enabled ara in reaper, which took an awful lot of time and ended up with a reaper session of more than 150Mb… and long load time….

[johne53]

all other daws don’t have a problem to start play when pressing the spacebar. Eventually I can sent celemony an email, but as explained earlier for me it is more logical to see what harrison says first….

It's just that if there's some reason why the spacebar feature works differently with different DAW's, Celemony are the most likely people to know why 

[DanielTT]

Ha, sure thing, but to paraphrase your signature:
Knowing why the spacebar doesn’t work is knowledge
Knowing how to make it work is wisdom
And the wisdom most probably comes from harrison
:-)

[DanielTT]

Just got a reply from Harrison…
There may be room to address these issues next year sometime but as for now we are hard at work for V8 and that is taking up most of our time as the weeks go by. ..

[johne53]

Over on the MacOS forum, Dingo mentioned that Mixbus plugin windows have an icon at the top RHS which allows keyboard input to either get routed to the plugin or passed back to Mixbus (it's shown green in my attached screenshot). I must admit, I had mixed success with it here. It seemed to work for some plugins but not all. Might be worth a try though....

[DanielTT]

Over on the MacOS forum, Dingo mentioned that Mixbus plugin windows have an icon at the top RHS which allows keyboard input to either get routed to the plugin or passed back to Mixbus (it's shown green in my attached screenshot). I must admit, I had mixed success with it here. It seemed to work for some plugins but not all. Might be worth a try though....

Yes, I am aware of that button, I referred to it as the green keyboard switch… doesn’t make a difference… You would expect that that would do the job… 
Looking at the reply of Harrison I think it is a known issue, but not super high on the priority list…

back to pro tools for now. (Doesnt have ARA either, but works like a breeze with Melodyne. Just don’t like the company behind it, Avid is so greedy)

[johne53]

Is your spacebar the only key which doesn't work or does Melodyne block all keyboard access to Mixbus? For example, the HOME/END keys or your L & R arrow keys. Normally they'll move your Edit Cursor to different positions but I'm guessing they might not work either.

[DanielTT]

No, they don't work either, at least not the arrow keys. (no home or end keys on mac...) Melodyne (MD) responds to the arrow keys by going to the next or previous blob... (MD has key mappings, I made sure that space bar is not in the list of assigned keys)
Also tried mapping a different key in mixbus to play/stop, like shift spacebar or f1, but result is the same. As soon as you have edited a note in Melodyne, Mixbus doesn't see the key strokes anymore, green keyboard on or off doesn't make a difference.
One thing I did notice, I posted this earlier, that if you double click in the edit window of MD, then MD will start to play from the position you clicked in solo. (this is MD's intended behaviour)
It seems that MD does some kind of a commit of some sort at that point, because if I press the space bar after the double click, then MB will start playing, and MD will jump to the position of MB's playhead. It seems that MD once you edit a note grabs the keyboard focus, despite the green keyboard switch, and only once it is playing it releases the focus.
Weird thing is that I've worked extensively with MD in Reaper, Pro Tools, Logic, and none of those suffer from this...
It is just that I would like to switch to MB, because of the workflow which I really like in MB. But looking at their answer this is probably not before v8... and maybe v9...

[johne53]

Weird thing is that I've worked extensively with MD in Reaper, Pro Tools, Logic, and none of those suffer from this...

I wonder if Melodyne has a list of 'preferred' DAWs that it's happy to co-operate with? I guess Celemony are the only ones who'd really know...