Pressing Play/Stop and Melodyne

[DanielTT]

Hi
I know, this subject has been brought up before, but I had the feeling it is time to mention this again.
I've been buying MixBus upgrades since v5, and I love the workflow and the company's philosophy. However, I still hardly ever use MB, for one reason, and that is Melodyne. 

Whenever you edit a note in Melodyne pressing stop/play will not respond, you first need to click somewhere in the edit window before it will respond to the spacebar. 
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. 

With every new MB version the first thing I do after installing is testing if this is fixed. And no, v7.2 still has this problem, at least on MacOS. 
And that means that I switch back to my other DAW for most of my projects. 
I mainly work with improvised music without a fixed tempo, and use Melodyne for the occasional mistakes (pitch, volume, length) of the musicians. I do all Melodyne edits by ear, which means a lot of edit/play/stop until I got it right. And then clicking the edit window every time before being able to audition the edit is a pain. 

I have tried some stuff like mapping play/stop to another key, but never got this to work. I know some people say I should buy a midi remote, but that is not a solution for me.
I know about the 'green keyboard' switch in the plugin window, but it doesn't make any difference. 
I know that other forum users hate it when somebody comes up with this remark, but still: I don't understand why this is not working, while in all other DAW's I ever worked in this is not a problem...

Even if it would be a global preference in MB 'always send key commands to MixBus' or other setting, I'd be happy. 

Really regret this, because I'd love to switch to MixBus. Reason for posting this is two fold:
- a bit of hope that some other Mac use found a workaround for this problem that I didn't think of (a key mapping or other smart solution)
- a reaction from Harrison, if they are aware of this, if this is high or low priority to solve, or if they will never solve this because there is deep down technical reason why this will never work.

Best, Daniel

[johndev]

I know some people say I should buy a midi remote, but that is not a solution for me.

Or OSC on a tablet/phone. 
https://discourse.ardour.org/t/web-surfa...s/105854/2

May I ask why some kind of remote is not a solution for you?

[Byron Dickens]

What did Harrison say when you submitted your support ticket?

You should also contact Celemony; it might be a Melodyne issue rather than a Mixbus issue.

[DanielTT]

Hi
@johndev - When I am at mixing stage i work on a proper speaker system, but editing is most of the work, and I that is all done on a laptop over internal speakers/headphones. Sitting on a couch or other places where you don't want to have all kinds of stuff attached. That's why I don't want to use a tablet or phone eiher. It has got to stay 'mobile'.

@ Bryon - well, you got a point. I contacted Harrison years ago about this issue, with v5, and then I got a reply (cannot find the reply, so I don't have the actual content) which said something like 'we are aware of this'. But that was v5, so maybe I should send them an email again. Will do.
Contacting Melodyne is a bit of an optimistic approach. You have to be realistic, MixBus is a small platform, and since this is no issue in other daws, I doubt they'll look into it.
(same as the issue with SoundToys plugins, where in MixBus you cannot use automation, this bug is only present in MB - SoundToys is not gonna fix that)

EDIT: I just realised I always use AU plugin format, so I thought I'll enable VST to see if there's a difference... 
Melodyne is the same, but for Soundtoys, in VST the plugin can be automated, this bug of automation not showing is only in the AU format.

EDIT 2: more experiments: when you edit a note in Melodyne and press the spacebar nothing happens, as explained. 
But when you, after editing a note, first double click in the Melodyne window (this makes Melodyne start to playback the content of the Melodyne window from the point you clicked, but your DAW will not play) and then press spacebar, Mixbus responds, starts playing from where the Mixbus playhead is, and then Melodyne playback will jump to play back from the point in the Mixbus timeline. 
Although a bit confusing, this seems to be a bit of a work around...

[Byron Dickens]

@ Bryon - well, you got a point. I contacted Harrison years ago about this issue, with v5, and then I got a reply (cannot find the reply, so I don't have the actual content) which said something like 'we are aware of this'. But that was v5, so maybe I should send them an email again. Will do.
Contacting Melodyne is a bit of an optimistic approach. You have to be realistic, MixBus is a small platform, and since this is no issue in other daws, I doubt they'll look into it.
(same as the issue with SoundToys plugins, where in MixBus you cannot use automation, this bug is only present in MB - SoundToys is not gonna fix that)

How can you be so sure?

[DanielTT]

@ Bryon - well, you got a point. I contacted Harrison years ago about this issue, with v5, and then I got a reply (cannot find the reply, so I don't have the actual content) which said something like 'we are aware of this'. But that was v5, so maybe I should send them an email again. Will do.
Contacting Melodyne is a bit of an optimistic approach. You have to be realistic, MixBus is a small platform, and since this is no issue in other daws, I doubt they'll look into it.
(same as the issue with SoundToys plugins, where in MixBus you cannot use automation, this bug is only present in MB - SoundToys is not gonna fix that)

How can you be so sure?

Well, I obviously cannot be sure, but it is an estimated guess... If something works in all major daws, and if the company makes most of their money with sales to users of these major daws, then it will be low on their priority list. Might be wrong, I know. I just don't want to waste people's time if the logic is quite clear: it works in all daws I ever tried, except mixbus. But i've contacted Harrison support, and if they give me a good reason that the above assumption is wrong, then I will contact Melodyne. 
but the logical place is to start with Harrison.

[sunrat]

It also happens for me for some plugins with 32C on Linux. I vaguely recall the previous thread about this issue. The problem IIRC is that some plugins accept keyboard input so focus must be on the plugin window for that to happen. Then focus must be returned to the Mixbus window if the keyboard is to be active there for eg. transport control. I guess it should be possible for certain keys used for transport to always be focused on the Mixbus window and thus always be active for transport, but it could be a nightmare to code that way. If spacebar is used for play/pause, how does one then insert a space in text input for the plugin?

[DanielTT]

It also happens for me for some plugins with 32C on Linux. I vaguely recall the previous thread about this issue. The problem IIRC is that some plugins accept keyboard input so focus must be on the plugin window for that to happen. Then focus must be returned to the Mixbus window if the keyboard is to be active there for eg. transport control. I guess it should be possible for certain keys used for transport to always be focused on the Mixbus window and thus always be active for transport, but it could be a nightmare to code that way. If spacebar is used for play/pause, how does one then insert a space in text input for the plugin?

Yes, I guess you're right. But I thought they made green keyboard switch/keyboard focus for that purpose. This is why I think it is something 'deeper' in the Mixbus code where Melodyne prevents Mixbus to receive the key commands once their window is in the foreground. Other plugins work fine. 
Although it is not much use speculating how difficult it is to code something since we're not the ones who have to do it, my guess is that if the problem would be a simple as you describe, then coding it would not be a nightmare. The software always 'knows' when the cursor is in a box that will accept keyboard input, because then the cursor changes from a pointer to a vertical line. 
So the system already knows that the mode has changed. For what it is worth...

[johne53]

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?

[bjohnh]

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.