Ability to shift sequence start within the current play range in Playbeat

Feature Requests
1

Hi,
I’m getting into Playbeat 3 and am really pleased with the feature set so far.

I find the shift feature very musical because I can easily shift a pattern to where I hear beat 1 should be. What I’m missing is a way to combine this with variable pattern length.

My request is for a toggle between shifting all steps in the pattern (the current behaviour) and cycling just those within the current play range, so that I can shift the sequence start without changing the audible content of the pattern in other ways (i.e. losing steps that are now moving outside of the play range, and gaining steps that weren’t part of what I was hearing before).

An alternative to a toggle would be to add a sequence start marker that can be moved anywhere within the current play range. This has the advantage of being ‘non-destructive’ in that it preserves the overall sequence info (e.g. for those who want to focus in on a subset of a sequence and then expand back out to the full sequence). To maintain ease of use the sequence start marker could follow the play range start by default, only deviating if the user specifically clicks and drags on it.

The second request (or bug report) is about visual indication of steps in the current play range. The manual seems to mention this: “All steps that do not belong to the active range will be greyed out”, but I am changing the play range and it doesn’t make a visual difference to the steps. Please let me know if I am missing something there.

2

Hi Quaylebeast,
Thanks for reaching out and for your feedback. Yes that could be possible to do.

About your second question, the range can be adjusted individually per sequencer, so is it possible that you are tweaking the range on e.g. Track 1 > then Click on Track 2 and you stop seeing the range edits of the previous track?

3

Hi,
Thanks for your reply; good to hear the feature might be possible.

I think I have realised what is going on with the greying out: I now understand that bright or ‘dimmed’ steps indicate both whether a step has a sample assigned, and, for those with a sample, whether the step is part of the current play range. This explains why changing the range didn’t affect the appearance of steps in my case - I had no samples assigned as I was using the plugin purely for midi output.

My suggestion/request would be to provide separate visual indications (e.g. bright/dim and coloured/grey), so that you can see whether the steps of non-sample-bearing channels are in the current play range. Another good play range tweak would be to align the range bar with the actual space taken up by the steps…