Getting Started Getting Started: Input Devices Overview
Monday, 24 June 2024
This is intended as a beginners guide to the Input Devices overview pane of the Side Slider within Master Patch.
The Input Devices Overview page lives inside what is known as the 'side slider'. The side slider can be found on the left hand side of the Band Page and gives access to a number of focused pages for different tasks.
The intention of the Input Device Overview page is to give the user a visually friendly way to view the state of input devices and also give them ways to update and change the patch from this view.
Upon clicking on the Input Devices overview button you will be taken to the Patch Matrix Page, which features two two areas.
- The Ribbon Menu
- The Device Overview section
The Ribbon Menu
The ribbon menu contains additional functionality related to the Input Devices overview window.
- Show/Hide +48V
- This button toggles a red visual status indicating if this channel has phantom power (+48v) assigned to that channel of the input device. This is useful for having a quick overview as to if some channels have phantom power incorrectly assigned which can help when dealing with sources that might be damaged from phantom power incorrectly being turned on, such as Ribbon microphones or the output of portable electronic equipment such as mobile phones, tablets, and laptops.
- Show/Hide patch
- This button toggles an additional column on each input devices which shows to where this channel has been patched on the channel list. This can be a useful overview for users who like to physically patch by box rather than by reading the channel list.
The Device Overview section
The devices overview section will be populated with a visual representation for each input device that has been defined in the project, and gives an easy to read and digest overview of the data for each input device.
The user is also able to make updates to the patch from this view by dragging and dropping channels between input devices. Users still benefit from the same patch warnings as featured throughout the application, making sure the user does not double patch a channel.
Moreover, from this view entire input devices can be swapped by dragging and dropping the name of the input devices onto one another, this has the effect of both boxes swapping their patch entirely - this can be useful for example if an act has just come on stage and although they said Guitar was on Stage Left and Bass was on stage right, now it is the opposite (tale as old as time) the user can quickly update the patch with very little effort.
Input device data can also be exported in various formats which might be useful to the user, for example the data could be exported as CSV data to then be imported into a piece of label making software to create clean and organised labelling for stage boxes and sub snakes on stage.
