How Can We Help?

Last updated:

User Interface Basics

Patchboard provides a bunch of different views for your data, at different levels of specificity. At the highest level, the Catalog view lists every patch saved in Patchboard’s database. The Project view is slightly more specific. It lists every track available in your DAW’s current open project along with any patches linked to those tracks. Finally, the Dashboard view shows the controls for a specific patch that is selected or record-armed in the current project.

Around all those views, Patchboard provides a bunch of common tools for quickly filtering, adding or editing patches.

Catalog

  1. These quick filter lists are populated with all the metadata from your patches. Only metadata that exists on a patch will appear here. If you press an item, it will show only the patches which match that metadata. The Clear All and Clear buttons will disable active filters en masse.

    It will also filter related, subsequent quick filter lists. In this example, Patchboard is only listing the tags that are available for the violin patches, rather than the complete list.

    Project
    Shortcuts to show only the patches or tracks that are linked in the current project (or unlinked). This can be useful to show you only the patches that are available at the moment rather than your entire catalog. Or which tracks don’t have a patch linked yet.
    Favorites
    A shortcut to your current favorite patches or switches within a patch. You can quickly toggle your favorites by pressing the ☆ next to a patch or the ♡ next to a switch.
    Groups
    Groups are effectively curated playlists or folders of patches. You can add a patch to a group via the Patch Editor or by right-clicking on a patch and choosing Edit Groups....
    Developers, Libraries & Instruments
    These are populated based on the metadata for your patches.
    Tags
    This column combines both patch-wide tags and switch-specific tags into one list.
  2. The toolbar contains shortcuts to various features:
    Toolbar Buttons
    (from left to right)
    The sidebar_left button opens and closes the quick filter sidebar on the left.

    Catalog: The folder button is available only in the Catalog view. When active, the view changes to show both the patches and all their switches.

    Dashboard: The uiwindow_split_2x1 controls how the dashboard is displayed and which sections of controls are showing.

    Pro & Indie: The doc button on the right creates a new patch from a preset.

    The plus button on the right creates a new patch with the Patch Editor.

    The bars icon opens Patchboard’s main menu, which includes additional view options and menu items to import to and export from your Catalog.

    Search Bar
    The search bar allows you to filter down the list of patches or tracks via any text search query. The text searches every piece of metadata for a match, from the patch name and track name to the individual switch names.

    When searching multiple terms, e.g. violin core, only patches that match both violin and core will appear. If you want to search for an exact match, use double quotes: "violin core".

    Note: For advanced users, the search field also supports regular expressions. To query based on a regular expression, enclose your query in double quotes. "viol|cellos|basses" would find all patches matching any of the enclosed terms.

    More info on regular expressions and their syntax is available online.

  3. The contents of the Catalog, Project or Dashboard are displayed here, depending on which view is active (see 4).

  4. The view bar allows you to move between Patchboard’s main views.

    Catalog
    The Catalog view shows all the patches you’ve ever created in Patchboard. Just because you’ve created a patch does not mean it’s available in every one of your projects, though.

    Note: If you want to see only the patches available in your project, you can press the In Project quick filter.

    Project
    The Project view shows all the tracks in your currently open project, along with any patches that are linked to those tracks.
    Dashboard
    The Dashboard view shows an instrument-specific set of controls for the current record armed patch (or selected patch if none is record armed). The controls are generated based on the data you entered for the patch when you created it in the Patch Editor.
Next Catalog View
Table of Contents