BrainModular

I love Usine Hollyhock's Modular patches, I found Usine after being dissatisfied VCVRack doesn't (and won't until it's enabled in gflw3, an open issue since 2013) support touch screens while I can just make my own easily in Usine's interface, all literally at my fingertips!

One thing I haven't been able to figure out is how to enable a free-form (and snap to grid) workspace layout, like I can do in the patching window. I've tried disabling the auto-reorganise feature, but it seems the workspace, or at least modular patches are auto-aligned and the only way to rearrange them is by dragging rack/component titles ontop of another.

Bitwig's Polygrid has the right idea, allowing the user to drag modular components on a freeform snap-to-grid "infinite" canvas, it seems Usine Hollyhock should have this capability since it's literally a "build your own DAW" DAW, and I can manually configure everything else, I can rearrange the layout using the left and right slides, although abit cumbersome.

I think this is important because the layout of patches in Modular mode contributes to the experience of organizing your wires and allows you to visually group related components to some concept, like you would do in patching.

Edit:
Another option is to have modular patches in horizontal (or even vertical) racks like other patches

Thanks for your words on modular patches. We spend a lot of time on it and for sure it's a nice feature in Usine. Please, share wkp (maybe in private if you prefer), I'm interesting in knowing how users employ them.

For your questions, if I understand :
- first of all, when you put rack in the grid, you can deactivate "show when active on grid". Like that, your rack will not collapse on the left of your screen.
- then, you can use the IB mode also, there you can have a free-form and snap to grid layout. Unfortunately, for now, just the patches could be moved. I ask Senso if it could do something for the racks easily.

Hope it helps.

Sylvain

Thanks Sylvian,
I understand the first and second points but isn't quite it,

If racks could be moved around on a grid that would be perfect

About this grid, feel free to propose this in the suggestion forum, Senso will see it more easily .

It is the suggestion place

oops

Here's and idea: maybe have secondary IB mode where it displays all racks present in workspace in compact mode (modular racks would look same, but regular racks would automatically hide input/output so they're also made more compact. and then you would have ability to drag-n-drop reorganize them manually, but they would snap to adjacent racks with margins set in auto-organize settings.

here's example, all racks have 'show in IB' checked, but for proposed mode all racks should be shown I've set IB to auto-organize and it did neatly pack racks together, but in some specific order. so the current problem with this approach is that you can't move those racks around so they snap in place in different order, when I activate unlock UI, I can move rack, but it just snaps back to where it was as long as auto-organize is active. Instead we need to be able to re-arrange those racks like modules in Bitwig's Grid, but not necessarily snapping to actual grid, just adjacent racks with specified margins.

another idea to add here for this secondary IB mode, or rather 'Modular rack mode': for 'minus' button to act differently as well, instead of making it a tall strip in the middle of the workspace, make it collapse in place, but all modular inlets and outlets would be still visible, sorted in some arbitrary order (whatever is convenient for development of this feature), perhaps in miniature size so that we can still see all the wire connections and patch stuff in/out while rack is 'minimized' like this. traditional arrow minimize would collapse the rack traditional way, but perhaps it should still stay in same place, instead of being tossed to the left-top corner.