How to label Pipes?

Hi,
I am a beginner with Midihub. I can’t find this in the documentation : could you please indicate how I can label the functions I create with pipes ?

I plan to use a control surface that has lots of buttons and potentially several functions per button. So my Midihub preset will have about a hundred functions. For the moment, in the editor, there is apparently no way to know what a pipe does to the destination machine.

Thanks

Hey @Drabki, welcome to the forum.

Midihub currently doesn’t have labelling of pipes, pipelines or sections of a patch.

This is a feature that is quite high on users’ priorities AFAI can see from forum posts.

I think it is something that Blokas will introduce in an update, but in the meantime your closest thing is making notes in the Description Panel:
Doing this during development will save a lot of head-scratching a few months down the line!




PS. Description Panel max number of characters = 1024

Hi @resonotter , thanks for the information.

This is indeed fundamental because of the amount and the possible complexity of functions.

When will it be introduced ?

Please note that I am looking for at least a reference. Meaning, even a simple identification like a number could do the job, but it would be great to be able to save at least a few words with a given function.

I’m just a fellow user so I don’t know.

My sense, though, is that @Blokas is quite keen to get it done.

My guess is that virtual mappings was the most pressing need for version 1.15.

Now that Midihub has made that (huge) step, “Labelled Sections” should be pretty high on the pecking order.

It might look a little like this…

…but maybe without the shading.

The “Section Heading” would probably be “attached” to the Input Pipe/Generator immed below so that it would move as the line is dragged up/down to rearrange sections.

There would also likely be a limit on the num chars so as to keep mhp files small.

(but, again, them’s my hunches!)






In the meantime…
another user suggested using stray Virtuals as bookmarks

This allows you to at least break up your patch into more distinguishable blocks which you can then describe

2 Likes

Hi @resonotter ,

Thanks for the reply and the examples. I vote for the first idea you proposed because it is the easier to read and also because it allows to visually separate the elements.

The second idea (stray Virtuals) got me thinking about 2 possibly new types of pipes :

  1. “Comment line” to be used like the stray virtuals. But you could change the name of the pipe to have a short idea about what the section below does whithout having to click on it;

  2. “Comment pipe” : a dummy pipe that does nothing but contain comment information. This comment pipe should also be able to display a few words so that it is partially readable in the flow.

Reckon Comment pipe is unlikely as MH pipes are only 10 bytes after the pipe-type id byte. As such, blokas might worry that mhp files could get fat with comment pipes!

Comment line would be incorporated in idea1.
Always visible
Being locked to 1st pipe in line would likely be copied with drag&drop of pipe1…
…but maybe also offer extra affordance of d&d on label itself giving copy&paste of entire section.

That would make reuse of sections easy :smiley:

Hi everyone, +1 for txt / comment pipe, this is not the first time this topic emerged in the forum. Cheers.

Yeah, related ideas in Jun21, Sep22, Dec22, last week and few others I remember reading .

How about a companion comment file that stays on the computer and “augments” the mhp file in the editor?

Yeah, I floated that idea once. Dunno what @Blokas thought of it.

Since then, I starting working on 2 different macs which I guess would complicate things.

My hunch is MH will get some sort of lean in-preset commenting first, then see how users react.