Rane HAL1x Design Guide - Page 114

HAL SYSTEM DESIGN GUIDE Let's say you plan to use a DR1 in the lobby of a restaurant to control the volume of the music playing in the dining room. Sometimes the music plays in the lobby as well and, in those instances, you want the DR1 to control the volume in both the dining room and the lobby. You might create two control links for this DR1, with one linking the DR1 level control with the level control for the dining room only, and the other linking the DR1 level control with both the dining room and lobby level controls. You would then activate the control link you want at a given time. So how do you activate a link? When you create a control link, you configure its state by selecting or deselecting its Active checkbox. For details on the actual procedure, see Activating/Deactivating a Control Link. That's all fine and good, you say. But how do I then change that state at a later time? Surely I don't have to go into the software every time I want to activate or deactivate a control link! Of course not. This is where presets come in. See the next question (and answer) for details. Can presets alter a control link? You've created a control link and now you want to activate it in certain situations and deactivate it in other situations. You could, of course go into the software and manually select or deselect the Active checkbox any time you want to change the state of a control link. But this would be a bit cumbersome, don't you think? In most cases, you will use presets to alter a control link's state. NOTE: A preset can change the state of a control link. But a preset cannot change the participants in a control link. Let's look at the example from the previous question to help illustrate this point. You have a single DR1 that you want to control volume in the restaurant dining room only at certain times, but other times control volume in both the dining room and lobby. You would need to create two control links, as follows: l Dining Room Only control link has two participants-the DR1 level control and the Dining Room level control l Dining Room/Lobby control link has three participants-the DR1 level control, the Dining Room level control, and the Lobby level control The Dining Room only preset would activate the Dining Room only control link and deactivate the Dining Room/Lobby control link. The Dining Room/Lobby preset would do the opposite-activate the Dining Room/Lobby control link and deactivate the Dining Room control link. You may be tempted to try creating a single control link for the DR1/Dining Room volume control and then using a preset to add or remove the Lobby level control when needed. But this is not possible. Presets can alter only the state of a control link. Presets cannot alter the control link participant list. How do I create a control link? BEST PRACTICE: Before creating a control link, you should add all the control participants to the Halogen Hardware Map and Processing Map. In other words, you cannot create a link between two controls until you've made those controls available. For example, if you plan to create a link that includes a DR2 Selector control, you should first add the DR2 to your Hardware Map and configure it to behave as a Selector. When linking only two controls, the simplest method for creating the link is to drag the link icon from one of the controls and drop it onto the link icon of the other control. If linking more than two controls, there are other issues to consider (see Advanced Topics on page 114 for details). 110