Hotbuttons

[Gunther]

Dear David.
I'm using Multiplay in the "HotButtons" format to trigger music cues and advertisements on a small radio station.
Would it be possible to leave the running cue highlighted (different color maybe) to make it easier to find?
It would also be desirable that when triggering a cue, the previous one is automatically faded.
Thank you very much

[David]

I think that both ideas can be achieved.

For the fade option, would it fade all previously running cues?

[David]

The corners of the hot buttons used to change with the button press and release.

As a test I've changed that now so they are more rounded when the cue is playing.

I'm not sure if there is a better way to show it playing as the colours can be different per button.

[EdK]

That looks good to me.  Great idea.   Makes it easy to visually identify it as a running hotkey cue.

[David]

Any hot buttons that are shortcuts (not cue list or adlib list triggers) will still show the larger rounded corners while pressed.

I did think of adding a small icon to each button that showed when it was playing or paused. I'm not sure how that would work out considering the buttons can be resized and the colours could vary a lot.

[Gunther]

Yes David when triggering a cue, the others should fade. In this way the operation becomes much more dynamic.

[David]

I've already added code to fade all other cues (extra option for control cues), so should be able to add that to the hot buttons as an option.

The question then is should it be an option that applies to the hot buttons as a whole, or on a per button basis?

Either way, the fade all others action would only be triggered on main or adlib cue buttons, not shortcut buttons.

Having in as an option per button would mean slightly more setup for the user, but is more flexible as some buttons could still play over the top of others.

[David]

Thinking about this some more, if it were on a per hot button basis there would be two check boxes per hot button (in hot button properties).

One would be to fade all other cues in the main cue list and the other would do the same for the adlib list.

That way you could have hot cue buttons triggering adlib cues and fading other adlib cues only, without affecting the main cue list. It could work the other way around too.

If both check boxes were ticked on an adlib hot button, all cues in the main list would be faded out and all except the button's adlib cue would be faded out in the adlib list.

[Gunther]

David Thank you. Now Hot Buttons in version 3.0.175.0 is working as I had thought. Amazing.

[Gunther]

David. In Hot Buttons it would be desirable to have several pages within the same project so that the cue blocks don't have to be too small when we have about 100 songs.
Thanks

[David]

I understand what you mean, but would have to think about a good way to implement pages.

[David]

I've had a play with making the Hot Buttons panel have scroll bars so the buttons can be larger and not all buttons are visible at once. While it works, I'm not sure how user friendly it is.

Pages may be the better way, but there would have to be a way to define how many buttons per page there should be. If the total number of buttons was less than the page size, then no page controls should be seen.

Speaking of page controls, maybe a bar at the bottom of the Hot Buttons panel could have previous and next buttons as well as show what the current page number is?

[Gunther]

Maybe for each page a different configuration in the amount (number of windows) of "Hot Buttons".

[David]

This is what Production Properties > Hot Buttons will look like. I've move the font type and size to the Appearances grid and added a Pages control.

The grid layout is still determined by the Rows and Columns controls. The new Pages controls simply specifies how many pages of that layout you want.

Existing productions will default to a single page of buttons for compatibility. I'll try and make it so the font type and size are transferred to appearances.

The Hot Buttons panel itself will have a bar at the bottom with controls for next and previous page. I could make it so that bar doesn't show if there's only one page.

The bar shown will be improved before release.

[Gunther]

David. Will we have this modification in the next update?