[Rwp] Bridged mode [was: Setting value parameters within an effect]

[Chris Belle]

When I did sfz for reaper a couple years ago,
with autohotkey,
I know, childs play compared to your coding skills, but I was told by 
some of the guys who did hsc and were working with reaper and sonar that 
it was better to have a separate window for plug-ins so they could be 
programatically identified,
all the same stuff probably shows up both ways,
but probably easier to get at and organize and get access to in the 
separate process.

I know when trying to find controls in a window, it's a lot easier when 
they're not mixed up with controls from the main window.
I can see where object nav would make this easier to deal with, but from 
a traditional screen scraping point of view, is generally better.

That's my take on it, I could be wrong.



On 4/2/2015 5:25 PM, James Teh via RWP wrote:
> Hi Scott and others,
>
> What does bridged mode actually give you that you don't get normally? 
> As I understand it, there theoretically shouldn't really be any 
> difference in what you can see with a screen reader. Bridged mode does 
> use a separate process and a separate top level window, but otherwise, 
> the content is supposed to be the same. Now, obviously, if this works 
> for people, that's not the case, hence my curiosity.
>
> The only difference I can think of is that normally, it can be much 
> harder to get focus into the plug-in's own window, although you can 
> still do that with object navigation.
>
> Jamie
>
> On 3/04/2015 7:38 AM, Scott Chesworth via RWP wrote:
>> Hi Chris,
>>
>> What you'll find via Shift+P depends on what the plugin itself
>> outputs. Some output what I call real-world values (though I think the
>> correct techie term is probably formatted values), other don't. For
>> the plugs that do, you'll see things like attack times in MS, ratio in
>> numbers that actually mean something etc. For the ones that don't,
>> pretty much everything is represented by a number from 0.0 (all the
>> way off) to 1.0 (all the way on). The slider that gives values in
>> percentages is still working with that range from 0 to 1, so 55% on
>> the slider will be 0.55 in the edit field. That's useful to know if
>> you want to key in values quickly without faffing with the slider.
>> Experimentation is the key here, but yep, it's annoying. You'll find
>> you probably have the most consistent luck getting real-world values
>> out of the stock Reaper plugs. ReaComp for example should be showing
>> you values that you know how to work with.
>>
>> There's one other technique that can come in handy when a plug doesn't
>> show you much useful stuff after you've hit Shift+P, and that's to try
>> running the plugin in bridged mode. Reaper does this automatically if
>> you try and run a 32-bit plug in a 64-bit environment, but you can
>> force it to bridge native plugs too, and sometimes that'll enable you
>> to access settings in a more meaningful way than Shift+P does. To
>> force a plugin to run bridged, before you open it, go to Preferences,
>> then Compatibility which you'll find just underneath Plug-ins in the
>> tree view. Tab until you reach the "VST bridging and firewalling"
>> combobox, and set that to "In dedicated process per plugin". Now when
>> you load Autotune, you'll find yourself in a separate window. You'll
>> need to use the virtual cursor of whatever screen reader you're using,
>> but you'll find that options for key, scale, voice type etc can be
>> clicked on and change there. Not everything is accessible that way,
>> for example to use the the humanize function of Autotune I had to go
>> back into the parameters in the Shift+P dialog and set the slider to
>> 100% to turn that on, but between those two views, you can get a lot
>> done.
>>
>> Yeah, I know, this is all a lot more of a headache than Pro Tools. The
>> one thing that keeps me sane about it is that between the two views, I
>> can usually get something usable out of most plugs, whereas in PT they
>> either work or flat out refuse to. The best thing is probably just to
>> try a boat load of plugins, and make the ones that expose good values
>> work for you. Over time I've built up a list of go-to plugins in both
>> DAWs, but due to the different methods of access on each platform,
>> they don't tend to be the same plugins across both DAWs.
>>
>> Hth explain things a bit.
>>
>> Scott
>>
>