Program Management, Backing Up and Restoring

[JDrage]

Ok, so twice now, I have accidentally overwritten a program. The second time I had a backup so I restored easily. But I wanted to figure out how this was happening and potentially identify something I was doing wrong and/or hopefully help steer others away from doing the same thing. During my exploration I discovered several new features under the umbrella of managing programs which I wanted to share here as well.

Here’s what I determined to be the cause: When pressing and holding PROGRAM to save, if you touch PROGRAM briefly you enter a program selection mode which looks very similar to SELECT mode, but is quite different. What you are doing in this mode is searching for and retrieving programs into the current program slot, rather than moving between program slots. So, if like me, you were in the process of making a pass through several programs to check and adjust routing settings, what happens when you are thinking you are moving on to the next program, is that instead you are retrieving the next program into the current slot. So when you save, you are saving over the last edited program. The default filter for this mode is All lists, in alphabetical order, and the programs I was editing just happened to all start with the same character, and are sorted. So I did not notice this. Maybe this is a unique scenario, and that ordinarily when you turn the SELECT knob to move to the next program you would immediately notice that the next program wasn’t the one you expected, back out to SELECT mode and carry on with life. Anyway, I wrote this up with the hope that someone else would read this and understand how to avoid this problem. Looking for the SELECT knob illumination ring seems like the obvious thing to look for, but maybe I’m making a small DCR to display something more obvious in the OLED panel for this program retrieval mode?

The next thing I did was try to figure out if there was a way to restore a single program from a backup, rather than the entire backup… which there doesn’t seem to be a way to do. So consider extracting something from a backup payload a feature request too. 🙂

However, I discovered that there are lists. When I first set up my unit, I think I copied the Factory programs into User 1 and then used User 2 for any custom programs I’d built. For programs for my band, I just used the end of the list — programs 91-99. This is fine, except pretty soon I was going to run out of slots.

I noticed that I could export a list, and when I imported it back, it can be done as a copy (with a custom name!). This is a way to bring back individual programs, and from now on I’ll be exporting lists (as well as taking a full backup of the unit periodically). After copying and pasting what I need (feature request: keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste? It’s on the context menu, for those wondering), I could just delete that copy of the list and be on my way. However, I also discovered that you can add arbitrarily lists, and rename them (previously I’d thought this was limited to just User 1-4). Which prompted me to create a list for the band programs, and then I discovered that I could arrange them conveniently for BANK mode because some songs use multiple programs. Not only that, but in H90 Control it’s easy to rename banks and this makes it very nice organizationally on the unit, since I can switch to PERFORM mode to see the state of the HotSwitches etc. and switch back to BANK mode when I need to go to the other program.

I love how the more I use the H90 the more useful and intuitive it becomes. Hope this post lights up some new features for some of you!

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