Feature request: copy/paste or swap/move SOURCES (or blocks of sources)

Unless there’s something I’m just completely overlooking, the handling of sources is absolutely tedious when you have to move something. I get the idea is that you’ll always be patching stuff on stage and labeling sources before building out a show file on the console, but:

1) That’s basically never my real-life workflow. If I’m doing a show or a festival or a corporate gig, I’ll have been doing pre-planning and prep work and want to be showing up with my show file at least 80% before I even unload the truck and start setting up the stage. Leaving all of that until last-minute is ludicrous unless you have nothing but time on your hands.

2) As the famous saying goes, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Whether my workflow involves doing the patching-and-labeling sources thing first, or building out my show file and channels first, someone is always going to throw me a curveball (or 20). Maybe I had a certain number of sources planned for drums and then started patching guitars and, oh wait, just kidding… drummer shows up with an extra 2 toms and a sample pad that weren’t on the rider. And oh yeah, there’s one more vocalist than we told you. And look! A fiddle player! “There’s no fiddle player on the stage plot? Huh, we must have sent you our old stage plot.” And the lead guitarist shows up with his fancy modeler and insists it needs to be patched in stereo, but it was already patched in mono and there’s no adjacent even-numberd input free without shifting some other stuff.

So now I have a bunch of sources that are already labeled and/or assigned to channels, and I need to move some of them.

Scenario 1: I was soundchecking a 1500 cap show a few weeks ago and the AES50 line between DL32 on stage and WING at FOH starts glitching. Total audio dropouts for ~1s, spaced somewhat randomly, just far enough apart not to be able to recreate it at-will or watch it while it happened. Some sort of static issue. Driving me crazy. Clearly unnerving to the band. I’m thinking to try swapping from AES50-A port to AES50-B port on the WING to rule out a port going bad before sending someone back to the shop for a spare SuperCAT cable to try in place of the one I’m running. Oh wait… I can’t copy/paste a block of source settings (gain/+48v/mute/etc) from AES50-A to AES50-B. I can’t even copy/paste them one at a time. (Just like how I can’t copy/paste within AES50-A from one source to another, as I was indicating above). I’m going to have to rebuild these ~30 sources and ~10 outputs on AES50-B completely manually, and then switch all my channels and outputs over to AEB50-B to even have a shot at switching ports. This is going to take so long it’s not worth doing. I could probably drive to the shop and back myself by the time I was done repatching this.

I could almost see a way to do this (albeit painfully slowly, one-at-a-time) from the channel input section by:

• Turning “Link Customization to Source” off

• Selecting the Main Input

• Copying the Source customization to the Channel

• Selecting source group AES50-B

• Selecting my new source (ie. used to be input 9 on AES50-A, so I’m now selecting input 9 on AES50-B)

• Copying customization back from Channel to Source to get it on the new source.

• except… oh wait. Gain and +48v and mute aren’t saved in the channel scope at all, so copying that customization back and forth really only helped with name/icon/color. I’m still going to have to manually rebuild the gain/+48v settings for every channel.

Scenario 2: I have a pretty complicated show file built for a group I engineer for regurlarly, but depending on the venue we may scale up or down a bit, and there is some variation to what may be provided by the house or rented in. If I have a show that usually uses two DL16s home-runned to FOH, but for a particular show the venue provides the ethercon and has only run one AES50 line from stage to FOH (expecting that we were daisy-chaining the DL16’s or coming with a DL32). We can certainly make that work if we have to, but again, I can’t just copy sources 1-16 from AES50-B and paste them on 17-32 of AES50-A (either as a block, or individually one-at-a-time) and get on with my day. I have to manually rebuild each of those input channels by hand, noting the gain and +48v status of the “old” source and entering it on the “new” source.

I could see it working similarly to the functionality you already built out to drag/drop channels (or blocks of channels) onto a user layer on the touchscreen. That already allows add/move/swap/insert/remove functionality.

Any time this kind of thing comes up I find myself sweating away in an unexpected time crunch wondering, “Am I stupid? Am I just missing something? It can’t possibly be this tedious. I must be doing something wrong.”

So how about it? Am I just missing something that should be obvious, or is this process really as tedious as it seems? If it really is just as tedious as I described, maybe y’all could improve that aspect by adding some copy/paste options for sources?