Flo Tools 2.0 is Here!

What’s new in Flo Tools 2.0, you ask? Well, sit back and let us tell you!

New major features include Plug-In Views, Flo Tools Num Pad, and Flo Tools Mouse.

• For starters, just to keep you on your toes, the Flo Tools team has changed the keyboard shortcut for activating the Inspector. Pressing the forward slash key now toggles the Flo Tools Inspector on and off.

• Now that the Shift plus forward slash keyboard shortcut (once used to turn off the Inspector) is available for linking and unlinking the timeline and edit selection, we thought we’d make it easier to know whether or not the two are linked. Now, when you press Shift+/, Flo Tools reports the status of the timeline and edit selection. Double-tapping Shift+/ toggles the state. Cool, right?

•We’ve eliminated the second half of the Speak/Edit Grid Value macro because, While one can choose from a list of pre-defined values for the grid, As cool and handy as it would be to type a custom length for the grid, it turns out that this is impossible to do in Pro Tools. Who knew?

• We felt so bad about taking away half of a shortcut that we decided to give folks a new one and that’s the Speak/Edit Tempo macro. Press Command+f11 to have Flo Tools speak the current tempo. Double-tap to edit the tempo value.

Keep in mind that you’ll first need to either press delete or the decimal key to make sure you’re entering the value in front of the decimal.

• Remember how awesome it was the first time you had the Inspector speak the volume and pan settings of a track without the need to interact? Well, Flo Tools now takes it a step further by allowing you to change those values as well, all without the need to interact.

Pressing Command+Control+up/down arrows adjusts the track volume while Command+Control+left/right arrows adjusts the pan. For stereo tracks, Command+Control+left/right arrows adjusts the left channel while adding the Shift modifier adjusts the right channel.

Let’s see how long it takes you to remember that you don’t have to interact with a track anymore to change the volume or pan, considering it’s old habit for Pro Tools users.

• The modified mouse clicks in Flo Tools were so popular that we decided to make them available outside of Pro Tools, but we needed a way to toggle them on and off easily so we split the commands off into their own macro group that can be enabled/disabled by pressing Command+/. We’ve also added new navigation commands for moving the mouse pointer with the keyboard.

Press Command+Option+Shift+up/down/left/right arrows to move the mouse pointer up, down, left and right respectively by increments of 10 points at a time (about an eighth of an inch).

•There are several commands for navigating plug-in parameters in the new Plug-In Views feature which you can read about here. In addition, there are a couple of shortcuts that make it possible to speak mouse pointer coordinates relative to the top left corner of the current window , and copy them to the clipboard at the same time. It’s also possible to move the mouse pointer to specific coordinates within a window by typing or pasting a value into an edit field. Now that’s something that even Apple hasn’t thought of yet, but, hey, Flo Tools can handle that.

• Remember the Plug-In Monitor? well it moved but it left a forwarding address. It now resides in the new Flo Tools Plug-In macro group.

It still works the same but it’s got a few new neighbors like the Previous and Next Preset shortcuts (left bracket and right bracket respectively). There’s also the Speak/Toggle Bypass command (Option+b) as well as the Speak/Choose Preset command (Option+p).

• What’s that? You forgot your extended keyboard? No worries—Flo Tools has your back with the new Flo Tools Num Pad macro group. Press Control+/ to turn on the num pad commands and you can thank us later. See the Getting Started Section for a comprehensive list of shortcuts.

• We’ve already mentioned how the Plug-In Monitor relocated, well, another macro has changed its identity but, fortunately, it’s not in the Witness Protection Program so we can tell you all about it.

To make a very long and boring story short, the Speak Clipped Tracks command is now called “Speak Tracks With 0 dB Level.” Until we figure out some things with Avid behind closed doors, this macro behaves exactly like the “Speak Clipped Tracks” macro used to, reporting the tracks that have reached 0 dB or higher.

Since a track can exceed 0 dB once it is in the digital domain, it would be incorrect to always report a track as having been clipped even if it isn’t clipped but has gone over 0 dB either because of processing or having been pumped through an aux input . So, to be more accurate, we’re renaming it and we’re working on a new macro that will accurately identify tracks that are truly clipped.

we wish it could have been ready for this release but it didn’t work out and we’re trying our best, so keep the feedback coming!

And that’s about it for version 2.0. No—wait! Speaking of versions, ‘we added a little thing in the Keyboard Maestro Engine menu extra that displays the version number.

We’ve added over 100 new macros in our effort to give users the best experience possible. In the last minute blur and hard work to get this release ready for everyone, we may have accidentally skipped a detail or two in these release notes; but, in the end, user success stories and great feedback absolutely makes it all worth it. we hope you continue to enjoy Flo Tools and take advantage of its new features.

Go with the Flo!

The Flo Tools Team

Written on December 25, 2016