Populate groups by type via macro

in Live: Query Type x Record Group 2 Enter

Hello,
i knew this syntax in live, but what about in Macro? How can I tell the board that i've "x" different types of fixtures?

The macro I thought to create was something like:

> Query Type "all types" Record Group next <enter>

1st query for DImmers
2nd query for Moving lights type 1
3rd qyery for Moving lights type 2
..
nrd qyery for Moving lights type n

 

In a meta programming language i'd do like: 

> count number of fixtures type patched on board

> query type number x

> create group x

> increment x

> repeat until x is equal to number if fixtures type patched

What about doing the same with macro syntax?

 

p.s. any chance to get a manual just about doing macros? kind of expert how-to that explain each command 

Would be great I think

 

ah, you can't. you have to know which types you will have. the only "general" ones are auto-generated like "Luminaire LED Yoke Spot" that you can find in Query > Text. but still you can't do "Next" with query types nor texts you would need to specifically mention those instances

Ah ok..it's a big pity. It would be great to create all groups with just a macro
Thank you for your precious help

Anyone from Etc knows if there is any future possibility to get that manual I'm asking about?
I think I won't be the only one happy to get such paper :)

Whilst you can't totally do what you were wanting you can actually get vert close, with it just needing a small amount of manual intervention.

Your macro needs to

Macro_Loop_Begin
Query Wait_For_Enter Record Group Next
Macro_Loop_End

if you run that macro it will popup the query window where you can click on the next fixture type hit entter and then it creates the group and popups the query window where you click on the next fixture type and so on. When you are done you hit Escape and it stops asking for more fixture types.

I'd not thought of having a macro like this before but its actually useful to be able to create groups by type, I've added it to my master show file.

I dont think you are going to get a manual on macros as they are not a scripting or programming language, they are just a command replay tool. The only extra bits really are you can do the repeat as above and you can wait for the user to do something before continuing the macro, you can wait for a length of time in the macro.

There are a some tricks you can play to make more out of them however.

You can call a macro from another macro, so you can use that almost as variables in that if a macro just contains a sequence of digits you can use that in another macro. So supposing you record a macro that does some complex sequence of applying focus and colour pallets to a channel you could make all the references to the channel number to be another macro, and then if you change the value in that macro you can run the first macro for different channels. An example of where i used that was setting BPM on multiple effects, I have a macro that does the set of the bmp on each effect in turn getting the BPM from another macro. Doing that allowed me to have a master BMP value that applied to all my effects for busking.

I then took that further and on my magic sheet I have a button for each song in the set and pressing that copies a value into the macro that holds the value and then runs the main macro that sets each effect to that value.

Hope that helps