Info View text inconsistency when hovering over UI objects in bpatchers (M4L device)
I noticed an issue that recently arose. I am working on a Max4Live device which contains several bpatchers. When loading the M4L device in Ableton Live, I have noticed that some UI elements do not show the designated Info Text when hovering over the object.
Anything in the top-level patch works perfectly as it always had. But some UI objects in the bpatchers just show the generic " The XXXXX Midi Effect". To make matters worse, the problem is inconsistent... certain objects show on hover one moment and not the next, live.dial objects seems to work better than live.text objects, some will only show the info after the parameter is changed. So at this point I really have no idea how to debug the problem because I cannot isolate it.
I will try to replicate the problem in another patch and post it here. The problem only exists in a particularly large patch which I cannot share quite yet.
In the meantime, has anyone experienced inconsistent behavior of the INFO VIEW TEXT in M4L devices, specifically when hovering over UI elements in bpatchers?
Thank you all so much.
This has unfortunately been a problem forever. I wouldn't personally recommend trying to workaround it by trying to re-organize your patch, but it's certainly worth reporting as a bug to the appropriate authorities.
I'm not sure why hovering behavior for this is kinda unreliable when clicking certainly isn't. But somehow I suspect, like many things M4L, it's just way trickier under the hood passing these events between Ableton and M4L than the illusion of a totally unified process makes it look. (Also, I remember a pretty distinct improvement in this a year or two ago, but certainly no to the point of it being near perfect)
Thank you Tyler.
It's good to know I'm not alone and that the patch structure probably isn't the culprit. The good news is that the Info Text shows up seamlessly inside Max (in the bottom popup window, which I'm assuming is a new feature in Max 9?
It also may have something to do with recent Ableton updates. I guess my next steps will be to try the current device version inside older versions of Live. I'll also try earlier, less-complex versions of the device itself, inside current version of Live. Tongue twister. If earlier versions with less parameters are not malfunctioning, I guess we will have to figure out a different way to display all of that Info Text.
One of the main features of the device was that an entire manual was populated into the Info Views for almost 600 parameters. So perhaps the patch is just getting bogged down. It's just confusing that all of the MIDI, automation, and what I'd think would be more complex processes are working so smoothly, yet recalling a few lines of text is broken. Luckily all the info is already organized into a dictionary, which it what we used to populate the device info in the first place.
Thanks for your help. We're looking forward to sharing the device when we get closer to completion.
I'm having the same issue and wondering if anyone has found a solution for this.
It's especially about the "Long Name" parameter which doesn't seem to stick. What I currently do is I open and close the Bpatcher in Original and New view several times, save it several times and wiggle things back and forth. One after the other, the parameter seems to be saved.
It also seem to help to wiggle the bpatcher itself back and forth once.