While troubleshooting something the other day for testing purposes, I had a situation where level meters weren't responding. This was quite unexpected because it wasn't as if there were a ton of tracks in the session. Now, some of you will recall that, when there are too many tracks within a session to display at once in the Mix window, the tracks that are technically off-screen will not have their level meter values respond. Any tracks that appear to be "to the left" of the Track List pop-up menu (still referred to as the "show/Hide" list but that'll change soon), are really off-screen and anything "to the right," is actually within the boundaries of the window and will update the level meters correctly. I've written about this before so anyone not familiar with this phenomenon can search the archive or look at their mail archive, etc.
so, in this case, I was dealing with a session with only four tracks and the level meters weren't responding. I had reimported the files into a new session and the meters seemed to suddenly work. It was bizarre to me. Then I realized that, in the original session, somehow, the View menu's settings for the Mix window display were set to display everything. The window, therefore, was displaying mic pres, instruments, inserts and sends for both a through e and f through j, the I/O displays, meters, comments, etc. Of course, this meant that the contents of the Mix window extended beyond the edge of the physical window which happened to be sized relatively small. So, since the level meters were technically off screen (not horizontally but vertically), VoiceOver was seeing a reference to the level meters because, as we know, VoiceOver sees all kinds of things that aren't really visible but, since the meters weren't really visible, there was no activity to report, no actual levels to speak of so no numbers to report. In a case like this, either a page down or a zooming of the window fixes the problem. Creating sessions from templates would probably be useful in avoiding this situation to begin with but I'd sooner shoot myself than use templates. Frankly, if you receive sessions from others, there's no guarantee that the windows are going to be maximized and, chances are more likely than not, the windows are going to be all over the place, depending upon people's preferences. It's a good idea to get used to the possibility that a window's size might simply not be maximized at any given point. Zooming is great but even zooming doesn't necessarily guarantee that the window is going to truly be at its maximum dimensions. For those who use Keyboard Maestro, there's a single workflow item for tasks such as sizing the window. I set up a task to maximize the window to its largest possible dimension and it works flawlessly. Worth checking out if KM is part of your tool set. Anyway, again, this whole level meter thing caught me off guard. As much as I use Pro Tools, things like this rarely happen so, when they do, it sometimes takes me by surprise and I'm reminded that others might experience head scratchers like this perhaps more often than I might so I figured I'd share this little reminder. Slau -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Pro Tools Accessibility" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
