 In this video, we're going to be looking at how to organize a loop deck so that you can understand how best to use profiles, plugins, workspaces and pages. And if you don't know what all of those are, don't worry, you will do by the end of this video. So this is intended to be the second in a series of videos all about getting up to speed with the loop deck part of my beginners guide. I'll leave a link to all of the other videos down in the description. And really what we're doing here is in the first video we looked at the device itself. So just in case you aren't familiar, this is what we're talking about. In this case, it is the loop deck live and looking at how to go about starting to get set up with this in terms of how to organize all of the different things that you want to do with it and start to build out this sort of framework if you like for getting it exactly how you want to use it for whatever you want to use it for. So let's come over to the application itself. I gave a quick overview of the interface in the previous video, but just a quick recap. This is a sort of graphical representation of the device itself. We're going to be programming this with all of the different buttons and actions and things like that that we want to do. Assigning different things to different buttons on the device, simply by choosing them from this list over on the right hand side. We've got various different ways to organize here. So a number of different these are called plugins, which have different groupings of actions that we can assign to any of the buttons. And then down here for each of these ones, as I go through changing here, it has some further subgroupings. And we can just literally drag and drop the actions onto the device. There are really, you know, hundreds and thousands of potential combinations of actions that we might want to use on this. So we are going to need to get a little bit organized. And so the way that we're going to organize our actions on our screen is as well as using pages so I can swipe on the screen and it will swipe through multiple different pages of actions. But again, I mean, even just in that sense, you could literally have, you know, hundreds of pages worth. And so it would get a bit hard to manage. So there is an easier way though, and that is through the use of profiles and workspaces. So let's start with profiles. Think of a profile as a specific use case that you have for the device. And in fact, if I come up to the menu just up at the top here, you can see at the moment that I am selected as my main profile. And this is the default profile that I've just set up for the purposes of this demonstration. If I click in here, though, it has a little drop down list for us. And here you can see the other profiles that I have on this device. And this probably then makes it a lot more clear what exactly profiles are for. Because we do have down here a number of application profiles. And so this is basically, you know, a different use case for the device. So when controlling After Effects, Adobe Audition and various other different applications down here. So I should say there are really two ways to think about profiles. And this is clearly demonstrated here. Either you're going to be working with application profiles where they're going to be organized on an application by application basis, just like this. And in fact, you can have it so that it will automatically switch the profile dependent on the application that you are in. And indeed, that is the default setting. So this thing called dynamic mode. If I turn that one on, if I were to open Adobe After Effects now, it would automatically switch to my Adobe After Effects profile. Or if I was to switch to Adobe Illustrator, then it would switch to the Illustrator profile. So these are basically a profile, a collection of actions for each of those applications. This is one way to think about working with the loop deck. The other way to work with the loop deck is rather than have the device itself switching based on the application that you're in. You could create your own profile where you have a collection of actions. They might be for multiple different applications all in the one profile. You'll see as we go through which one might work best for you. I can certainly see the benefit of having it automatically switching from one to the other. I personally don't like that approach. The reason being that I often spend a lot of time either in meetings on Zoom or on Teams, something like that. I want to use the device to control the Zoom or Teams meeting, and I don't want it to switch over to my Microsoft Excel actions whilst I'm on a meeting. However, I might well have Excel as the active application. So I don't find it useful for it to be switching on my behalf as it were. Also, I do a lot of videos, so obviously videos for this channel, but then recording tutorials and things like that for other training courses that I create. I also therefore want to have it so that the device might be controlling my recording software whilst I am in another active application, if that makes sense. Maybe I'm a little bit niche. This doesn't necessarily work well for me. That said, I will obviously go through and explain the whole process of how you go about setting these up and the use case for them because I can totally see the benefit of it working in this way. By the way, it does just seemingly switch over from one to the other. So as you are hopping between applications, when you click into Photoshop, for example, if you have this one toggled on, then you've immediately got all of your Photoshop actions to hand. So as I say, I can totally see the use case for it. So here we can see that we've got a number of different applications and these are, by the way, I should say a lot of these are just there as a default when you install the device and the loop deck software, they're just sort of pre-populated, they're all ready to go. In some cases, you may have to install a plugin in the application itself. So for example, in Photoshop, there is a Photoshop plugin that you install through your Photoshop plugins method. I won't cover that in here because if you're a pro Photoshop user, you'll know how to install plugins in there to actually have them sort of talk to each other as it were. But let me just come in and then show you what this means as in switching between profiles. If using Photoshop as an example, if I click on my Photoshop profile here, what that's going to do is that's now changed all of the buttons on the screen. And in fact, if I show you my device, once again, as always, what is being shown on the screen is replicating what's on my device. So there is my Photoshop profile. If I come back to my desktop just for a moment to the application, if I was to go in and change to another one, say Adobe Audition, then it has now got a completely different set of actions on here relating to that particular application. And so that is basically what profiles are. Think of them as like your collections of actions for whatever the task in hand happens to be. Now, there is actually another layer to this as well because you may have different things that you do within these applications. So whilst switching profiles actually just changes all of these different actions within a different profile, you can have multiple pages. So I've mentioned this previously just with a swipe on the screen. We can swipe through multiple different pages of actions. But even then you might have a lot more actions than you can contain on multiple pages and you want to have different sort of work modes within that particular software. Well, just using this one as an example, and this is, as I say, one of the sort of pre-installed ones, we have then got workspaces. So a profile is, think of it as, you know, the application if you like. But then the workspace is sort of different modes of working perhaps within that application. So a workspace, if I click in here, you can see we've got multiple different workspaces. So in this case, they've named it editing, track states and mixer, view, file and various other different ones. So different things that you might be doing within the application itself. Now, what that's going to do is if I change to one of these other ones, let me just pick one at random, this view one. You can see that once again, it's changed the buttons, but I should say that all this is changing is the dials here and these touch screen buttons here. The buttons down at the bottom are basically sort of global buttons within that particular profile. So the workspaces do not affect these buttons down at the bottom. And that's quite handy because or purposeful, I should say, because the buttons are then used to actually switch or can be used to assign to switch between different workspaces. So here that list of workspaces we had up here, here, editing, track states and mixer, workspaces, windows, view and so on. What they've done is they've actually assigned those to these buttons. So I can also just press the button and switch between these various workspaces by just clicking on the buttons on the device down there. So that's why these buttons down at the bottom are basically fixed per profile and don't change with the workspace, rather they can be used for navigation. And indeed, that is the main way that I found that I use these buttons is generally I'm using these ones for kind of navigating around the device itself and they seem to fit quite well into that particular use case. So you may not be using Adobe Audition. So some of these things might not make sense to you. In fact, I don't really use Adobe Audition. It's just one of the ones that are in here. So let me just come out of that and show you that although there are a number of applications already sort of preinstalled with profiles and this comes back to the, you know, the sort of heritage of this device really. And the loop deck is that it has got a real sort of strong bent towards the Adobe creative suite and editing applications and things like that. So you'll find that all the Adobe suite profiles are sort of preinstalled in there and some of the other, you know, creative ones, Ableton Live and so on as well. But if you do want some other applications and you can't see them in here, we can also come down to the bottom and search for more because there are a number of others that have been pre-made for us. So specific profiles already made up for us. So just come down to here, more app profiles. Again, this is specifically if you are using this in the process or in the way of having it switch between these things on an app, you know, basis automatically. So if I click on find more app profiles, what that will do is open up the loop deck, loop deck marketplace. You can also get to that from the menu just up at the top here. But yeah, if you click down here, what that's going to do is open up this separate window, which is the loop deck marketplace. And in here you can find profiles, plugins, which we'll come to a little bit later and icon packs. But this is what we're looking at just at the moment is the profiles. And here you'll find a list of different profiles. You can see whether they are available for the Mac or the PC. So the little icons there signifying which ones are available. If it is a Windows only and you are on the Mac, then you'll notice it says not available for Mac. And vice versa if it is a Mac only and you are on a PC. But basically you can just scroll down here, have a look at the different plugins. It'll tell you who they're by. So some of them are by loop deck themselves have made the plugins. Sorry, the profiles, I should say. I don't want to get the nomenclature wrong there. And then some of these are by third parties as well. So this one is by somebody other than loop deck have created these. So the marketplace is going to be somewhere where people can add in their own plugins, profiles and icon packs at some point as well. This is the early stages of the marketplace. So currently it's signifying 30 profiles, 10 plugins and 43 icon packs. I know that just last night when this was released there were six plugins. So they are actually actively adding things in as we speak. If you want to install any of these then it's just a case of really clicking the install button. Pretty obvious really. You can click on these by the way, these little sort of tiles if you like. It'll give you a bit more information about it. Tell you about the developer and overview telling you what the different shortcuts are. It'll tell you the compatible devices as well. So this is saying loop deck live. Really this is perhaps slightly misleading because the loop deck live, the things that you have that work for that will also technically work for the loop deck CT because it's just not going to use the full device. Similarly there are some in here that say they are only compatible with the loop deck CT because they have got extra functionality linked to the larger dial for example or those other buttons. But in actual fact they still work on the loop deck live because it's just that they only use the buttons that are on the loop deck live portion of the loop deck CT if that makes sense. So all of that is to say if you do see this compatibility just take that with a grain of salt is my initial estimation of this because from my experience in the last 24 hours of trying this out they do seem to work. So I'll just say that. So then also you can then just come and click on the install button here. As I say if you are back in this list you can install them from there as well. So clicking on install it will if you come back to the regular application you'll see that it is installing. It is going to actually prompt you to link it to the application though. So this is asking me to select the application. So this was the Visual Studio code. And so what I need to do is actually just go and find that particular application which is not on this Mac. It's on my other Mac. Never mind. So what you do though is you would just pick out the application that it was assigned to and then just click on OK and I'm just going to cancel this one out. But that basically would then install that profile so that whenever you have that particular application open that profile would open up as well. So that's how you install basically a completely new profile from that list from the marketplace. You can also create your own though. So if you wanted to create your own application profile. So maybe something that isn't in the marketplace, something that isn't already in this list here but there's an application that you want to have your own set of actions when it opens. You can always create a new one just by clicking on these little three dots next to the application profile. And here you can see the ones we've got if you want to if you if you don't use any of these. So maybe I'm not using Lightroom. I can just uncheck that click on OK and it will remove it from the list. So now we don't have that Lightroom one in there. But yeah coming back to this. This is where we've got the list what we can do. I'll just take those ones out as well because I'm not using those click on add application basically just like that. And then we can select the application name. So let me just think what I might add from here. I'm just going to choose this one. I'm not going to create any shortcuts for my loop deck for my one password that would completely defeat the object. But for the purposes of this, I will just create that and then just click on OK. And that has now created a new profile for in this case one password. I'll be deleting that one in a moment. But now basically whenever I go into one password, then it would it would switch to that. And you can see how it has pulled in the icon as well there. So it just just bring it into the full list. Yeah assigning passwords to one button presses. It's not probably a good idea is it? But never mind. So that is how you you create your your own profiles for applications. So that is basically just a quick look at the way that we can work with workspaces and so on. But I will just come over to the the other way of doing things. So rather how we can work with profiles, I should say, and have them automatically switch on an application basis. But let's just come and look if we just want to build something out our self and just have it basically fixed. And we be in total control of how it's sort of changing from one set of actions to another. And then the way that we're going to do that is we're going to use this thing over here, this sort of main profile. And I'm just going to make sure that that one is toggled off. So basically if you're not going to use dynamic mode and have it automatically changing, then what you're going to do is come over here to this default profile. You can actually with all of these, although this says that these are the application profiles and this is the main profile, there is actually multiple profiles within these. So for each of these ones, if I was to come into one password, for example, click on the little three dots. There is my one profile, my one password profile that I've just created. I could actually create a second one called one password to just like that. And so now we've actually got two profiles under the one heading. If you see what I mean, so for the application, we can have multiple different profiles as well. This is where it starts to get, to be honest with you, a little bit confusing. But if you come into your main profile like this, then we can actually have, by clicking on the three dots, we can have multiple sort of main profiles as well. So these are all profiles which basically aren't going to change when the application opens basically. So this is how we can still have multiple profiles but just not have them automatically changing. It's just to me, not immediately clear that this is an option from this menu. So I'm just mentioning it because it could be a little bit of a source of confusion. Once you are in this main profile section and you've got one of these profiles selected, and by the way, to create new profiles, it's just the same as I've shown you already, you just click on the three dots except that this time we're going to click on those three dots up next to the main profile as opposed to application profile. And then from here, we can create a new profile from there. So we're just going to click on this add profile. There's another layer of potential confusion here which is normal profiles versus simplified profiles. All you need to know about that is that a normal profile is the ones that I'm going to be talking about all the way through this tutorial series. Those are the ones that have the workspaces and pages and things like that. A simplified profile basically just doesn't have the workspaces. So it's basically just a single profile with still multiple pages but you don't have that workspaces option. So I'm just going to keep talking about the normal profiles though from here on in. So clicking on the add profile is how we could add either an empty profile or if you click on add default profile, that's basically what we've got here. It's going to have a series of actions already on there. So it's going to be pre-populated with open Chrome Gmail, WhatsApp, Twitter, some media control keys here for playing pools and things like that. And then also some other shortcuts to various different things and emoji picker and some keys for the calculator and stuff like that. So if you are wondering when you are going to create a new profile, what the default profile is, that was it that we've just seen. And so really if you've got one of those profiles, maybe that might be useful, but you're probably just going to want to start with all of the other profiles that you create as just a completely blank canvas, I'm going to guess. So all you do there is just click on this one, add empty profile, just this one up at the top and then you're going to give it a name. So I'll give this nice simple name, new profile, so that we can know where we're talking, what we're talking about. So that is the one that we're going to be working in as we do this little demonstration of building this all out. I should say that as well, if you are again going down this route of not having it automatically switching by application, then you do have in the menu bar, there is a little loop deck icon. When you click on that, there will be a drop down and you do have a change profile option. And this basically lists all of those different profiles that you've got underneath the heading of main profile. So we've got the default one that we're on to begin with. We've got this default profile there and then the one that we've got now, which is called new profile. So I can just sort of switch back and forth between those from the menu bar itself. So that's how you would be able to sort of change between different profiles if you were just, as I say, being in full control of what was being displayed on your device. So let me come back to this one though, the originally titled new profile. And this is where we are now. We have got a completely blank canvas except for the clock. It always insists on putting the clock there. I'm not sure how many people would use a limited amount of screen real estate. I hate that term actually in this context, but with a limited amount of space and buttons, I'm not sure who would just have a clock on their device. But every time you create a new blank profile, loop deck always puts the clock there. You can just click these three buttons and then just click on unassigned. So that's basically how to delete anything from those button spaces. We don't want to clock there. We've also got something assigned to this particular button here. So I'm just going to go ahead and delete that as well. And with these ones rather than unassigned, we've got this little cross next to them. So this is how we can delete the action from that wheel. So essentially we are now in a new profile and we've just got the one workspace. And we've also got nothing assigned to these actions and there are no pages or anything like that. It's essentially a completely blank canvas. And so really the next step that we're going to look at is how to actually start to add in all of the different actions and things like that and start to look at how we go about programming this. Because as you can see there are a lot of different actions that we can potentially add and there's actually a few different ways that we can go about doing this and things can add complexity to it with multi-actions and macros and stuff like that. So in the next video, which is coming up next, I'm going to be talking about exactly that. Where we go from here in terms of building out the actions in our profiles.