With my bands, we play different sets of songs on each gig. Managing playlists has become easier since last version of Analog Lab but in my opinion is still far from perfect.
What I’m especially missing is the possibility to move/copy complete songs from one playlist to another. Couldn’t get this to work. Or am I missing something?
I would like to manage kind of a master playlist and grab the songs I need for a gig to copy them to another playlist.
Any idea how to achieve this?
Greetings, Richard
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Hi Richard,
Right now on AstroLab / Analog Lab, there’s no direct “copy/move song between playlists” feature.
A Song in Analog Lab is essentially a container of presets + splits/layers + MIDI settings. Playlists are more like pointers than independent storage, so there isn’t a built-in way to duplicate a whole song from one playlist to another with a drag-and-drop.
Here are the practical workarounds:
- Build a Master Playlist + Gig Playlists:
Keep one big “Master Playlist” with all your songs.
For each gig playlist, create a new one and add songs from the Master by searching them (not copy, but reference). This ensures any update you make to the song in your Master version stays consistent.
- Export/Import playlists
You can export an entire playlist to a file (.alplaylist) and import it into another.
Downside: it duplicates the whole list, not individual songs. But you can merge by importing and then deleting extra presets.
Hope this helps! The feature should come along at some point.
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Thanks for your reply.
But this all is quite disappointing. The board was advertised as the gigging musician’s gear.
I don’t want workarounds, I want solutions.
As a software engineer for many years, I’m sure that this shouldn’t be that hard to implement.
And what’s even worse: Yesterday, I prepared a playlist for today from a playlist that I copied from astrolab to analog lab. I edited the list inside analog lab with no astrolab connected, added songs and presets, whatever. I then connected astrolab to analog lab and pushed the complete edited playlist to astrolab.
Today, on my rehearsal, I found out that some of the patches in the playlist had the right names but completely wrong sounds, e.g. name is some piano but sound is some synth brass. Luckily, it was just a rehearsal.
I just can’t understand why arturia doesn’t manage to implement and fix this completely basic stuff.
Right now, astrolab is very far from the idea of the gigging musician’s keyboard and I’m not quite sure how long I keep hoping for the better…
Greetings, Richard
I understand, I’ve relayed your feedback to the team. Hoping to bring these features to you soon.
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“…playlist had the right names but completely wrong sounds, e.g. name is some piano but sound is some synth brass.,”
This happened to me too and I thought I did something wrong when trying to drag and drop pre-sets in Analog Lab when setting up songs. Now I know to double check after saving them to Astrolab, thx.
Agree on moving songs from playlist to playlist being a useful feature.
As far as Astrolab evolution, I also agree it’s got a ways to go to be a true stage keyboard where much can be manipulated directly with little menu diving. The Yamaha CK series is good example, and also benefits from allowing 3 parts.
I switched from my CK61 to Astrolab because the action on the CK61 was much too light for my hands (I suffer from tremor and nerve damage). The Atrolab keybed is the best I found in a 61 key w aftertouch, and I tried many so I’m willing to roll with the limitations and quirks but do see many areas for “stage keyboard” improvements, like being able to change a part volume with one hand (instead of holding “shift” key).
I realize the premise of the Astrolab is you are supposed to set most parameters up in advance on Analog Lab but part of the point of a “stage keyboard” is adjusting on the fly because your band throws something at you or the conditions change or you realize a previous decision you made for a gig or practice was wrong. This could be sound, part volume, pedal assignment, effect, split point, transpose, etc. All should be easy to manipulate from the keyboard, ideally with one hand (so you other hand can be playing the sound as you apply the changes so you can hear how it sounds).
Another approach to this would be to add more of these features to the ios app.