Patterns remain after deletion? How do you prevent this?

Nuendo
1

To my understanding this is a product design choice–the patterns remain even after you delete the clip. I do not understand this product design choice. Is there a way to disable it? In other words, if I delete a clip, I want its contents to also be permanently removed.

nuendo_pattern

2

With the Pattern Editor you can design an amount of different patterns. Unlike midi parts these pattern are stored in the Pattern Editor itself. What you see and delete on the track is merely the reference to the pattern.
It is similiar to deleting an audio event from a track. The audio file remains on the hard drive, the clip remains in the Pool.
You can delete the content of the pattern in the editor itself.

2 Likes
3

I think I understand the intention now.

A few points of confustion, if it is meant to be a bit similar to how audio is handled:

  1. I can drag an audio clip to a track and then delete it.
  2. Once it is deleted I can draw a new audio clip on the track using the draw tool
  3. The new audio clip will be empty. It will not adopt the previous audio clip’s contents.

So if I maintain that mental model regarding audio, it doesn’t match how pattern clips are handled.

I think audio clips are handled well. I especially like that I can view the Pool Window and see all the audio used in the project. If Steinberg’s intention is to make the pattern clips similar (but not identical) to audio clips, I believe they should take it further. Right now, this new paradigm doesn’t really match up with how other features work. Which makes it challenging to intuit or assume how it works.

Additionally:

The concept of deletion that does not actually delete content from its context goes against established functionality/expectations derived from other software. I just can’t think of a scenario where deletion does not actually delete from its specific context (deleting text in a word processor, deleting a layer in photoshop, deleting an object in Max/MSP, deleting a document from Windows, etc).

4

I was using the Cubendo nomenclature. The stuff that you refer to as “audio clip” is called “audio event”. Audio clips can be found in the Pool.

Furthermore I used the word “similiar” in my post, it is not identical. If the analogy doesn’t work for you then kindly forget that I used it and just remember that pattern events are merely references to the patterns, which reside within the Pattern Editor.

1 Like
5

Understood.

Steinberg, if you’re reading this, the process of deleting patterns goes against common user expectations of “deleting”. May be worth doing more user research on this.