When using VCV Rack, I have sometimes wished that there was a way to copy some large combination of modules from another patch into the current patch I'm working on. Maybe I made a complicated LFO / sample&hold / quantized / transposed melody generator in another patch, and I'd like to use that in my current patch but don't want to bother building it again from scratch. Or maybe I have a complex, multi-module synth voice that I'd like to duplicate four times (assuming polyphony is not an option in this case).
The idea of Patchlets is to organize patches in rows, each row corresponding to some collection of modules and connected cables that could be repurposed in some other patch. A collection of patchlets can be like a toolbox of go-to solutions that can be combined in different ways to form new patches.
I've found these tools helpful for my Rack workflow and I hope some others may also benefit from them.
Currently Patchlets is implemented as two different python scripts:
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extractPatchlets.py takes a v1-compatible .vcv patch and splits it into multiple patchlets.
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combinePatchlets.py takes multiple v1-compatible patchlets and combines them to make a new patch.
These python scripts can be run from any python environment, but standalone .exe files can easily be created with pyinstaller. The only packages they use are os, random and re. I've tested it on both MacOs and Windows, but not Linux.
Read the Instructions before using.
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Clean up the code: I'm not an experienced python programmer. This is my first python project and I've been learning as I worked on it. The code is well-commented but does not follow standard python norms. The code can be made much more efficient, but it seems to work fine for these tasks. I do plan to improve the quality of the code.
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Testing: I've tested these scripts a bunch of times, but I'm sure I've missed some combination of conditions that could make these scripts fail.
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Add more tools: The logical one to add next would be appendPatchlet, so you could just add a patchlet to the bottom of an existing patch. Currently you can do the same thing by splitting the existing patch into patchlets with extractPatchlets and then recombining the patchlets and adding the new one with combinePatchlets.
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GUI: I've been playing with making a gui and a file browser dialog using Tkinter.
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Executables: I have standalone .exe versions available and will add them to this repository shortly.
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Known bugs: Crashes when two patchlets with Core Audio are combined.
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Partnership: If anyone wants to help with any of this, just let me know.