Start custom Playtime from template

Would you like to adjust the default settings of new Playtime instances? Then you are at the right place.

Most settings in Playtime are instance-specific

When designing software with the concept of instances or projects, a common challenge is deciding whether a particula setting should be global (immediately affecting all instances), global template-like (affecting all new instances) or instance-specific (affect only the current instance).

For Playtime, I chose to make most settings instance-specific. Only settings related to appearance and performance — essentially everything in the Settings dialog — are global. The primary advantage of this approach is that it allows precise restoration of any instance, ensuring it behaves exactly as it was saved.

However, this approach has a drawback: You need to adjust settings for every new instance manually, especially if the default settings don’t match your preferences.

Track templates to the rescue

You can solve this issue by leveraging a feature that you probably already know: REAPER track templates!

  1. Create a Playtime instance as usual as explained in 3. Fire up Playtime.

  2. Modify the instance-specific settings to suit your needs. For example:

  3. Right-click the "Playtime" track and all column tracks and choose Save tracks as track template…​, saving the new track template as "Playtime.RTrackTemplate".

  4. Whenever you want to start with this custom Playtime instance in a new project, right-click the track control panel, choose

  5. In new projects, you can now right-click the track control panel and choose Insert track from template to insert your custom "Playtime" track template.

Done! You immediately get a fresh Playtime instance with your favorite settings, including all columns.

An action to make this approach more streamlined

The downside of this approach is that you can’t use the beloved Playtime button to add Playtime, because this one still creates the Playtime default instance, not your custom one.

This is where the action Helgobox/Playtime: Show/hide custom Playtime comes into play. You can add a toolbar button for this action:

  1. Right-click an empty area of the desired toolbar and choose Customize toolbar…​

  2. Press Add…​

  3. Search for action "Helgobox/Playtime: Show/hide custom Playtime" and double-click it

  4. Press OK

The default icon for this button is Playtime. When you press it, it looks for a track template called "Playtime" and loads it.

No default shortcut is assigned to this action, but you can assign your own in REAPER menu Actions  Show action list…​. For example, you could remove the Shift+Cmd/Ctrl+P shortcut from the Helgobox/Playtime: Show/hide Playtime action and instead assign it to this action.