Windows 7 and 10, Audacity 2,1.2
Hi, this is my first post so I hope it’s in the right place. I recently enabled Chris’s Compressor plugin and noticed that the instructional text at the top of the plugin window was missing. Checking other plugins with informational text also showed it was not appearing. To cut a very long story short I discovered it is because Audacity no longer recognises the “info” statement in the Nyquist program. This is a pity because the information at the top of the window was useful. I’ve searched everywhere to no avail, including the Nyquist reference manual, but is there any way to replicate what “info” did in older versions of Audacity?
It is not possible to display the ;info text without modify the Audacity source code.
The change was part of a broad overhaul of Audacity effects. The interface for Nyquist plug-ins is created by Audacity rather than by the plug-in itself. The “;info” command in the script (previously) told Audacity to place text at the top of the displayed interface. To be honest, I don’t really miss it because it gave us some very scratty looking plug-ins. With good design it shouldn’t really be necessary to have a block of text at the top (I can’t think of any VST effects that do that).
What I would like to see is more flexible GUI options generally for Nyquist plug-ins, so that they can be designed better, look better, and not need a block of text at the top.
In future plug-in versions it may be possible to add text as an element of the plug-in interface, but more flexibly than just at the top.
Thanks for the reply Steve. So at the moment you are saying there is no way to place text anywhere in the plugin window. With Chris’s Dynamic Compressor plugin, I simply wanted to restore my copy of the plugin to display the informational text he originally put in - for someone of my advanced years who only occasionally uses Audacity, it is helpful to have a reminder of what the different parameters do.
Other than the control labels, that is correct.
Each of the controls can have text (usually the name of the control) before the control, and text after the control (intended for adding the units, such as “dB” or “seconds”).
It is ‘possible’ to have more than one line of text in a label, but it makes the controls look a bit weird. Try running this code in the Nyquist Prompt effect and you’ll see what I mean:
;control test1 "text\nline 2\nline3" real "post text" 0 0 10
;control test2 "text\nline 2\nline3" real "post text\npost text line 2" 0 0 10
(format nil "You entered ~a and ~a" test1 test2)
Currently that is not possible, but what can be done quite easily, is to:
- change the control text so that it is more meaningful for you
- change the default settings (if that helps)
- hide any controls that you don’t use.
If that would be useful, then I can certainly help you to do that (if you need help).
Thanks Steve that’s really useful. From your example I can now see how to modify the control labels, but as you say, it does look a bit weird if more than one line of text is used. For the time being I’ll add some “post text” where necessary to act as reminders or hints.
We removed the help text because mostly the effects were documented in the Manual or at http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Download_Nyquist_Plug-ins.
In Chris’s case we have some information about the plugin in the Manual at http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/chris_s_dynamic_compressor.html. The “here” link on that page for the 1.2.6 version of the plugin leads you to an audio podcast which explains how to use the effect: https://theaudacitytopodcast.com/tap005-my-secret-audacity-recipe-for-great-audio/.
Gale