Color

Color

Three separate things get colored, and they answer different questions:

	what it tells you
the song — a band across its scene rows	where you are in the set
the role — clips inside a song	the shape of the song
the clip — one cell at a time	whatever you need it to

Color writes on click

The rail's Song color and Clip color controls each show the current color and open Live's palette when you press them. Pick a swatch and it's written — no preview, no confirm, and the palette closes behind you.

That's deliberate, and it's the opposite of how naming works. A color is instantly legible in the grid and picking a different one costs nothing, so the swatch is the action. A name overwrites something you can no longer see, which is why that side keeps a button.

The closed control says Mixed or uncolored when the selection has no single answer, rather than showing one of the colors as though it were the answer.

The fast path this buys is the one the app exists for: click a scene, pick a swatch — the scene's whole row of clips, recolored.

Writes that would change nothing are filtered out. Recoloring a scene where 22 of 30 clips are already that color writes 8, and the progress bar says 8.

A song is one color

Coloring a song is song-scoped, not selection-scoped. Touch any scene of Nightfall, press a swatch in Song color, and all twelve of its scenes are painted — reprise included. The panel tells you which songs and how many scenes before you press anything, because the write reaches rows you may not be able to see.

That's a deliberate loss of flexibility. A solid block of color in Live's own session view is what a hundred-song set is navigated by, and a per-scene brush is precisely what puts holes in it.

Two things follow:

• Roles color clips, never scene rows. A role paints its own cell in the Master column, and stops there. See Roles.
• A half-painted song shows as a fault, not as a color. Its header says mixed color rather than picking one of them. "Some scenes painted, some not" is drift, and the grid reports it instead of hiding it.

The song's color rides on its header as a bar down the left edge plus a wash across the row, so a fully folded set is a column of bands.

Live's palette contains colors dark enough to vanish against the app's background, so the band is lifted just far enough to stay visible. The hue survives — that's the whole point of showing Live's color.

Coloring the whole set from a rule

The palette icon at the right of Songs opens the rule picker. Four rules:

	says
by key	which songs will mix into each other
by bpm	where the set changes gear — the palette walks with the tempo
rainbow	nothing, but a hundred songs are told apart
random	the same, dealt

You get a preview of every song's new color, then one Apply. That shape is the point: doing this through the grid is one write per song, each with its own round trip and re-read, and the waiting is what stops anyone trying an arrangement.

Three behaviours worth knowing:

• A song the rule can't answer for is left alone, and named in the list. No key means no color — not "the no-key color". Painting a song by a fact nobody wrote down is how a color stops meaning anything. A song whose scenes disagree about the fact counts the same way.
• The count on the button is scenes, not songs. Apply the same rule twice and it says every song already carries its color rather than claiming a hundred writes.
• The modal stays open after applying, unlike the running order. The write is undoable, nothing has been renumbered, and trying a second rule against what the first did is the point of having four. The preview repaints itself.

Deal again on random is a different deal, not a different rule — colors come from a shuffled bag, so every allowed color is used before any repeats and no two songs in a row match. Independent random draws clump, and a clump of one color across three adjacent songs is exactly what a band is for.

Choosing which colors a rule may use

Live has 70 clip colors and several are hard to tell apart at the size a scene row draws them. Eight chosen colors read better across a hundred songs than seventy do.

The rule picker lets you pick the allowed set — start from the whole palette and remove, or start from nothing and pick the few you want.

That choice is stored in the set, beside your role vocabulary, in a hidden parameter on the device — so Live saves it into the .als. Two sets can want different palettes, and a set that travels to another machine takes its answer with it.

Leaving it untouched means "whatever the palette holds", which is deliberately not the same as ticking all 70: a future Live that shipped more colors should hand them to someone who never chose, and not to someone who did.

The palette

Live's 70 clip colors are compiled into the app. There's nothing to derive, nothing cached on your machine, and no button to press.

That's a change from how this used to work. Reading the palette out of Live meant briefly adding and removing a clip, which marks your set dirty and churns Live's undo history — and the table hasn't changed across the Live versions this supports, so paying that on every install bought nothing.

If the swatches are missing entirely, the app was built without the table and the fix is to rebuild it — the rail says so rather than showing you an empty grid.

One wart

Undo cannot take a scene color back off. Live has no writable "no color", so a scene that started with none can't be restored to none — the app logs a line saying so rather than letting the undo button promise more than it delivers. See Undo.