Question

The idea is to have a selection of automatic colour coding that occur based on track names.  

For example, if you like to always colour your drums in red, then when you name a track with certain key words e.g. "Kick", "hat" or "snare", that track would automatically change to red.

A track with "bass" in the title could turn to say blue (with over-ride from the user to another colour should they wish to change it after), "vox" pink and so on....  

These colour defaults and user determined word key codes could be set in a preferences menu.

Answer 1

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Answer 2

Great idea. For this I would add a "special" colour to the colour picker, e.g. one of the color picker cells would have the letter "A" (meaning "Auto"); when this "A" color is picked, track color is assigned automatically based on the track name. This  way auto and manual coloring can co-exist.

Would be nice if wildcards were supported e.g. *guitar* would match "Lead Guitar Left", and so on. Also, when a track name matches two or more criteria, Studio One should stop the matching process at the first matching item. Thus, *electric guitar* would appear above *guitar* to ensure it has higher precedence.

Answer 3

Great suggestions! This might also mean we need a checkbox next to "Auto-color" in the Create Track dialog, something like "Color by Name".

And somewhere would have to have a hierarchical list ranking keyword/color combinations' priorities. Just for reference, the way SWS does this is that there's a ranked list where even a partial match of a string will assign the color. For example:

1. hard       - color A

2. guitar     - color B

3. clave      - color C

4. clav        - color D

5. a            - color E

"Hard guitar" would be color A, because 'hard' is ranked above 'guitar' in priority. "Clave" would be color C, because it's a drum, but "Clavinet" or "Electric Clav" would be color D with the rest of our keyboards. Every one of those track names contains "a," but because #5 is so far down the list and there were other matches, nothing is colored E.

This kind of system allows users to come up with the perfect list for them overtime, as every time something shows up colored wrong you can just re-order the list to permanently fix it.

Answer 4

In response to @robertgray3, I don't think we need any checkboxes. New tracks are by default auto-colored. Users can, at any time, override this by picking a regular color. To go back to auto-color, simply pick the palette's special "A" color.