Mysterious little indicator

broc's icon

When building M4L devices I sometimes get a little indicator (white or red) in the upper left corner of GUI elements. What does it mean exactly and how can it be cleared?

kleine's icon

the indicators usually mean that you have an automated parameter.

Best
Christian

broc's icon

That's strange as I'm currently not using any automated parameters. However, the affected GUI elements are controlled in some way by send/receive messages. And the indicators magically appear somewhere in the process of editing and testing my devices.

Andrew Pask's icon

Can you give me a list of steps I can follow to reproduce?

Thanks

-Andrew

broc's icon

Unfortunately, so far I haven't found a pattern to reproduce this behavior.
But I'll investigate further and report any relevant findings.

Thanks for your interest.

broc's icon

Andrew,

now I'm able to reproduce the behavior with an example (attached).

The device simply allows to start and stop Live's transport.
Load it on a MIDI track and see how it works using its play button.

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

Now, press the *record* button in Live's transport and start/stop again.
After this I'm getting the automation indicator on the play button!

kleine's icon

Thanks for the example. As far as i can tell it happens because you use a "live" Max object which

- writes into Live´s Undo history and-
- acts like all other Live parameters when using the global record button, although in this case you won´t see a breakpoint envelope.

broc's icon

I'm a bit confused. Are you saying the behavior is normal/intended?

kleine's icon

Yes, absolutely - it´s a feature.

broc's icon

Thanks, I didn't realize the effect of the global record button.
Is this explained somewhere in detail?

kleine's icon

Automation is covered in Live´s manual chapter 18.

broc's icon

Ok, mystery solved.

Emmanuel Jourdan's icon

Christian is right that's a feature, and the expected behavior from any parameter in Live. However in this specific example, I don't think you want the live.text's play object to be seen as an automatable parameter, if you set the parameter visibility to hidden in the object's inspector it won't be stored in the preset or the automation.

broc's icon

Thanks Emmanuel, that option is exactly what I need. I just didn't expect that Live automates "everything" by default but basically appreciate the concept.