Skipping excel cells

Questions & Suggestions
#1

Hi All,

Just start led using KM today, love it but am not hugely technically minded.

I am using KM to batch bounce tracks in Logic Pro, named by cutting and pasting a track list in excel. Switching between programs, cutting and pasting. However, excel seems to skip the odd cell, meaning my track names don’t match up. I’ve tried inserting pauses to the macro between switching to excel and cursor down, copy, but doesn’t seem to help.

Does anybody know what causes this or how I can fix it.

Thanks,
Mark

#2

Hi Mark! Welcome to the club. :slight_smile:

Can you see it actually skip the cell, or are you assuming that’s what it’s doing because of the results you see?

#3

Thanks for the quick response Dan, I am pushed to get this done today so much appreciated.

I’m not seeing it skip (it goes so quick), but I can see Logic moving correctly - incrementally?

If this is difficult (to program or fix) I’m happy to just name files 1, 2, 3 etc. but don;t even know how to set that within the repeat cycle…useless, I know!

I’ve attached the macro if it’s of any use.

#4

Bouncing Stems.kmmacros (8.6 KB)

#5

Glad to help.

Before I look at the macro, let’s try this:

Immediately after the Copy, and immediately after the Paste, put a Pause of say, 0.5 seconds. That’s probably way longer than needed, but we want to see if a Pause fixes the problem. If it does, then you can lower it down until it still works, but isn’t so slow.

Since both Copy and Paste work in the background, you often-times need to give it a little time to finish. Usually not as long as a half-second, but we want to be sure before we go further.

Let me know if this works.

#6

Ok, I’ve just seen what it is. The first mistake that occurs is marker 5. Take 4 is very long, so logic takes longer to process, so seems KM is jumping ahead, taking excel with it. Is there a way to not skip to next step until logic has finished processing?

#7

What logic are you talking about, that takes too long?

#8

Is there anything that changes when the logic is running, or it has finished? Are there any menu items that enable/disable? Visual cues that change?

When I run things like this with Final Cut Pro X, I often use a hodge-podge of looking for images and menu states changing, to know when something’s done.

#9

Logic Pro music software so similar to what you say with final cut.

As it bounces the track, a new window appears with a progress bar. Not sure if there’s a way for KM to sense or wait for this to complete and return to main window?

#10

Absolutely. It just depends on a few things.

If the window has a title, you can detect it using one of the "if... window condition" options.

This macro may help determine if it has a window title, if you can't tell:

If it doesn't have a title, you can probably detect it using a partial screen image.

Let me know if you need help, although I have to leave for a couple of hours right now.

#11

Thanks again Dan. I tried the window monitoring method but whilst it showed a changing window name in Logic, it did’t seem to follow my instruction to wait. Because of time pressures I took excel out of the equation and just numbered the bounced audio files sequentially, then batch-renamed. It would be good to sort this at some point though as no doubt I’ll need the feature again. Bouncing the size of recording sessions I do in Logic puts so much strain it’s probably not the best combination.

Thanks Again.

#12

I’m glad you decided to just get it done, for now. I’ve been in the same position, and getting something like this to work when you’re under time constraints just isn’t worth the headache.

I got to wondering - does the progress window have any sort of cancel button on it? Because if it does, and that button doesn’t appear anywhere else, then you can use a “Pause until” to wait until the button doesn’t exist.

One of the difficult things about what you’re trying to do is that the progress window probably doesn’t stay up long enough to test a bunch of different things. If you really want to get this to work, you should make a really long track, perhaps by copying and pasting a track onto the end of itself until it gets really long. This way you can thoroughly test the different methods of determining when it’s done.

Actually, I think it’s a great combination. Nothing like being able to start it and walk away. I’ve got several workflows in FCPX that I can’t imagine doing any other way. I’ve even got a search and replace for changing clip names that can search hundreds of clips without me needing to do anything except sit back and smile.

Anyway, best of luck.