MixConsole Snapshot track, to automate switching between snapshots + other related export treats

A bit of context, I write scores for video games. Features in the vicinity of what I’ll be describing here are very valuable for people in game audio (and I think it’s part of the reason a lot of them like Reaper).

On a typical game I’m usually working on anywhere from 10 to 30 cues, and when the music is orchestral and all/most cues pretty much use the same instruments, it often makes sense to just have all the tunes in one huge project, one after another. I use a marker track and the arranger track to label zones for each cue, like “Intro Screen”, and “Moutain Level”, “Game Over”, etc. It enables working on many cues at once and sharing ideas between them, and has many other advantages. No more long closing and loading the next project for the next cue. That’s several minutes of productivity per hour already saved (if it makes sense for your project. For me it often does).

The problem is, even though most of the cues all use the same orchestral sections, a fair amount of riding the level faders has to occur between cues, which quickly becomes very hard to manage, makes the project super messy visually, and creates so much opportunity for human error.

the MixConsole Snapshot feature is already pretty amazing, but it has the potential to be much more than that and speed up similar workflows for soundtracks. Increasing the number of possible snapshots to unlimited or something big like 256, and adding a “MixConsole Snapshot Track” similar to a marker or an arranger track would just make the project immensely easier to work with and look at, it would remove all the need for dozens of exposed automation tracks having to be managed one by one. The MixConsole would have to remind you which Snapshot you’re currently “in”, and you’d just have to move the faders as you see fit, and when moving the cursor to a given part of the project, the faders would move to the appropriate snapshot.

Which brings me to my second wanted feature: Being able to define “zones” for audio and midi export, corresponding to the cues. That way, it’d be possible to automate an audio export that would render all the cues to disk at once, as separate files, and ignoring the space in between each one. That would be a tremendous workflow boost for people writing game soundtracks and having to export their cues many times.

Thanks for reading!

+1

Saving automation data, handling deleted and added tracks before or after a mix as explained here.

You can do this utilizing cycle markers unless I’m misunderstanding.



In regards to the first Idea, someone made a feature request recently I think, in which what you’re asking for, this would actually be better off being an extension of ‘Virgin Territory’ protocol - ‘Virgin Territory Memory’. I will find the post.

edit