Warn users attempting to assign the same instrument to multiple tracks

[Songtech-0912]

I had this issue recently whereby I would have an orchestral mockup with lots and lots of tracks. Because there were so many tracks, I gave up trying to make a separate instrument for every track. Instead, I created an instrument called "Sforzando" (the name of my sampler) and I planned to assign "Sforzando" to every track, and use Sforzando's GUI interface to choose the instrument sound.

That was a bad idea. I ended up with a very muddy sound, and I couldn't figure out why. Turns out I assigned the cello instrument in sforzando first. Problem is that because of how Helio is built, that same instrument is now shared across all of my tracks. So all of my orchestral instruments, ~20 in total, were playing the cello sound. Imagine the effect of using a cello sound to play a glockenspiel, a double bass, and a trumpet at the same time! That was what the effect of assigning just one instrument to multiple tracks was.

The correct way to go about this would have been to create those instruments separately. So if I assigned the cello sound to the cello instrument, it wouldn't affect the piano instrument or the oboe instrument. However, it took me a long time to figure this out (half a year in fact).

I think that this issue is very likely to plague newer users; it almost made me give up on using Helio completely (please don't take that too harshly). I can add it to the manual and submit a PR for that, but I am open to other ideas of pointing this out.

[suhr]

But using the same instrument for different instruments is handy too, so, for example, you can separate piano into several voices. But probably there should be a faster way to create a lot of instruments.

[Songtech-0912]

True. The big question is this:

• How do we warn users about a potential issue without obstructing their workflow or forcing them to read pages and pages of docs?
• How do we improve the ease of instrument creation and assignment?

I think both would involve some major UI/UX exploration to be able to figure out.

[peterrudenko]

How do we warn users about a potential issue

I mean, if you've assigned a single instrument to all tracks, accidentally or not, and didn't like the result, you can just Ctrl-Z it? Please correct me if I'm missing the point.

How do we improve the ease of instrument creation and assignment

Good question, it probably should be tied in with #150.

[suhr]

I mean, if you've assigned a single instrument to all tracks, accidentally or not, and didn't like the result, you can just Ctrl-Z it? Please correct me if I'm missing the point.

The problem is, DAW usually have it different: setting an instrument for a track makes a new instance of a plugin. So there's a mismatch between what people may expect and how helio actually works.

I think the documentation could highlight this more clearly.