Macros And Presets - Polycom Vortex EF2241 Programming Manual

As a convenient example, let us imagine a host program with a graphical user interface (GUI). The user
presses buttons on the GUI to enable or disable features of various linked Vortex devices. The buttons on the
GUI reflect the current status of the corresponding feature.
When the user presses a button on the GUI to enable or disable a feature, the host program should send the
corresponding command to the selected Vortex device. It may be tempting to update the status of the GUI
button at this point, but this can cause problems if there are transmission errors or if there are multiple host
controllers. The proper way to handle this is to only update the GUI controls based on acknowledgments
received from the Vortex device.
To implement this, organize your code so that the functions that send commands are totally separate from
the functions that receive responses from the Vortex devices. This also enables your host program to support
the presence of multiple host controllers. For example, consider the following sequence of events.
1. Another host sends a command to a Vortex device.
2. The Vortex device responds with an acknowledgment that is broadcast to all of the other hosts.
3. Your host program receives the acknowledgment and updates the status of the corresponding control.
The result of this programming model is that all hosts and linked Vortex devices will always be synchronized.
For simple on/off features, your host program can make use of the toggle arguments to some commands
(e.g., 'SSEN2'). By sending a toggle command when a button is pressed, and updating the button based on
acknowledgments, your host program will not have to keep track of the status of the button.
In a similar fashion, many of the integer commands (such as gains) can be controlled by incrementing or
decrementing them by a specific amount. For example, the command 'GAINIA>1 ' increments the input gain
on channel A by 1 dB. The acknowledgment for this command will return the actual value that the gain was
incremented to. Thus, to implement a volume control, your control program can send a command to
increment the gain by 1 dB when the "up" button is pressed and decrement the gain by 1 dB when the
"down" button is pressed. The control can update its level indicator based on the acknowledgment that is
received.

3.4. Macros and Presets

Although macros and presets are similar, there are times when using one is better than the other. Presets
store the absolute values of all of the non-global settings of the device. This includes, but is not limited to,
input and output gain settings, matrix settings, algorithm settings, parametric EQ settings, and automixer
settings. See Section 7
Presets should be used when you really want to change all the settings in a device. One example would be
when you want to have one unit be able to control different rooms. In this case, having a preset for each
different room is the easiest solution.
Macros are like mini-presets. You can define them to change only the settings you are interested in. One
advantage of macros over presets is that macros can make relative changes in addition to absolute changes.
An absolute change is something like "set the input gain to -3 dB". A relative change is something like "raise
the input gain by 3 dB". One example of using macros for a relative change is stereo volume ramping. If you
have two outputs setup to have left and right program audio, then you could build a macro that contains two
commands: one to increment the left channel by 1 dB and the other to increment the right channel by 1 dB.
Then, by calling that macro, you can ramp the stereo outputs. A similar thing can be done with decreasing
the volume.
for a list showing all the commands and which are saved to presets.