PRV colors

Here's my situation: I have a 5-part vocal harmony thing I'm working out. I was putting all the parts into a single track, but it was too hard to pick out individual parts, so I decided to split them into individual tracks. I cloned the track four times, and started over.  (My voice leading was crap anyway :-))  Now I select the five tracks and open them in PRV. Trouble is, it's a real pain to see the different parts in PRV because all the tracks are the same color. Is there some easy way to say "Make all the tracks different colors so I can tell them apart?" I don't care what colors they are, just so I can differentiate them in PRV. I know I can change the colors individually, but that's a pain, plus, like most every other option in Sonar, the ability to change the colors of the notes in individual tracks in PRV is hidden away in some secret menu somewhere that I can't find.
 
Another solution would be to visually "solo" a track in PRV, essentially hiding all but one track. I can hide individual tracks, but I don't want to go click-click-click-click all the time just to hide every track EXCEPT the one I want to see. This seems like a frickin' obvious needed feature. Do the devs over there not actually use their product? (Sorry for the snark, but these kinds of things seem so basic to me...)

Have you considered using Staff View instead of PRV? It's very useful for this sort of purpose, i.e. experimenting with harmonies, as it displays the instruments separately, unlike PRV which merges them together.

Otherwise, simply set the track colours and the note colours in PRV will change accordingly.

Yes the problem is that clip (and midi) colors always follows track colors, if it is not default. You can't switch it off, as I know. It is a big software design mistake, one of those in GUI area. I wish that time will come, when leaks like this will start being fixed. It just about adding one line in the preferences...

jkoseattle
My color needs are different from Track View and PRV. In Track View, I want sections to be colored the same (Vocals are all white, Strings are all red, etc.) but when I'm wreiting parts for a single section in PRV, then every track within the section needs to be a different color. 
 
@Bristol_Jonesy This is what I was referring to as being way too cumbersome to show only one track. If I have five tracks, and only want to see one of them, that requires at least four clicks. Then switching to show all again is four more clicks. Imagine if you had to solo tracks in track view that way!
 
@Kev999 Funny, I just tried staff view this morning as a possible solution. It's much easier to see when, for example, I accidentally recorded two parts on the same track, and is going to be really useful, but for editing it's not that great. I can't change durations very easily, and I can't move notes across tracks. Still, it solves 30% of the issue.

Hi Jim


Have you tried having each track on it's own PRV in the Multidock?
This way it's just one click to get to the one you want to work on.
 
To enable this, when you have one PRV view docked - right click it and choose "Lock Contents". Now, when you open up another track, the first one will stay there.
 

icontakt
Changing the clip foreground color (via Clip Properties Inspector) doesn't change the note color in PRV. This is a bug.

 
I do agree that it would be preferable for PRV to follow clip colour rather than track colour. But it's probably not a bug. In pre-X versions, track colour and clip colour were synonymous.

jkoseattle
The product is so bloated with features whose usability is only marginally examined. 

 
Agreed. Lots of good requests for usability improvement have been posted in the FR&I forums, but almost all have been unimplemented.
 
 

jkoseattle
Try opening two tracks in PRV that are two of those very close default red shades and look at notes with different velocities and I dare you to tell them apart, defeating even the workaround of coloring tracks differently! And then, one of the default colors is yellow, which, using the default PRV background of white and gray, makes that color basically unusable. 

Agreed again. I disabled the velocity coloring feature by registering PRVColorizeVelocity=0 in Preferences > File > Initialization File.
I also posted a feature request:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Add-a-custom-color-area-in-the-new-X32015-color-palette-m3202079.aspx#3202079
 
 

Kev999

icontakt
Changing the clip foreground color (via Clip Properties Inspector) doesn't change the note color in PRV. This is a bug.

 
I do agree that it would be preferable for PRV to follow clip colour rather than track colour. But it's probably not a bug.

 
I think you're right, Kev. I thought the PRV note color was linked with the track header color via the clip foreground color (which is more desirable IMO), but the two must be linked with each other directly.