It is very unfortunate and terribly confusing the way Studio One handles the linking/sharing of Instrument Parts and Patterns. Both the addition of the scratchpad and patterns ended up creating messy and in some aspect buggy behavior.
Here are some examples!
When applied to an Instrument Part:
- Duplicate menu (D shortcut) execute the Duplicate command
- Duplicate Shared menu (Shift+D shortcut) execute the Duplicate Shared command
- Dragging and dropping Move Events
- Alt + Dragging and dropping Copy Events
- Cmd + Dragging and dropping Copy Events Shared
This behavior is what the became used to since day one and Info View displays information that matches the actual behavior of Studio One before scratchpad and patterns existed.
However, when applied to Pattern:
- Duplicate menu (D shortcut) execute the Duplicate Shared command instead of Duplicate as shown in menu bar
- Duplicate Shared menu (Shift+D shortcut) execute the Duplicate Shared command as correctly shown in menubar
- Dragging and dropping Move Events as correctly shown in infoview
- Alt + Dragging and dropping Copy Events Shared instead of Copy Events as shown in infoview
- Cmd + Dragging and dropping Copy Events Shared as correctly shown in infoview
Thus, the information shown in the menu bar as well as in infoview is incorrect and misleading, but even more so (at least to me) what's confusing is the inconsistency in behavior between Instrument Parts and Patterns. There really is no good reason for this in my humble opinion.
Things get even worse when dragging and dropping across main timeline and scratchpad:
When applied to an Instrument Part:
- Dragging and dropping Copy Events instead of Move Events as shown in infoview
- Alt + Dragging and dropping Copy Events as correctly shown in infoview
- Cmd + Dragging and dropping Copy Events instead of Copy Events Shared as shown in infoview
When applied to Pattern:
- Dragging and dropping Copy Event Shared instead of Move Events as shown in infoview
- Alt + Dragging and dropping Copy Events Shared instead of Copy Events as shown in infoview
- Cmd + Dragging and dropping Copy Events Shared as correctly shown in infoview
Thus, when dragging and dropping across the main timeline to the scratchpad the modifiers are completely useless and falsely "advertised" by infoview. This is a bug that needs to be fixed in an upcoming release.
However, as a feature request, I would suggest to unify the behavior of Instrument Parts and Patterns so that duplicating and moving them around the main timeline and scratchpad always behaves the same, not matter what, when and where!
One possibility would be to have a single type of event to hold midi, call it instrument part or pattern, and have it editable in either the classic piano roll, the folded piano roll for drums or the new step editor (similar to what happens in FL Studio for example).
Like the current patterns, this unified midi event type would be shared by default upon copy+paste, duplication with D or dragging and dropping with Alt, even when dragging and dropping across main timeline and scratchpad or duplicating an entire scratchpad with the dropdown menu. Shift + D and dragging and dropping with Cmd would create a new instance that is not linked to the original.
Like the current patterns, this unified midi event type would have variations and (ideally) all unique instances within a song would appear in the pool. To avoid confusion, when renaming or recoloring this unified midi event type, all linked instances would also rename/recolor.
Just my $.02 :)
