 The Loupedeck software has just been updated to version 5.2, and they have made some improvements to the usability of the application user interface. So I'm really pleased about that. Still a little ways to go in my mind, but never mind. I'll talk about that a little bit more towards the end as well. So let's have a look at the release note, shall we? And it's pretty short, really, but it does belie the improvement that has taken place. So first of all, a redesigned action panel for a better and easier action management. That's going to be the main focus of this video, really, because that's the place that it was really lacking in before. And so, as I say, there have been some improvements made there. Color customization for the round buttons. So we'll have a look at that as well. The next two don't really apply to me as I'm a Mac user rather than a Windows user. Feature improvements to the sound custom action, Windows only. New open application custom action, Windows only. Although there is something that's a little bit similar to that, as I can see it for the Mac as well, though. So we'll take a look at that. Easier login and authentication process. I've got to say, I didn't really notice much difference between this and the previous version, and it wasn't something that I noticed was lacking. But if they've improved it, then we've got to be happy about that, haven't we? So there is that. So let's have a look, though, at this redesigned action panel and what has changed there. I did kind of get all excited about this when I first saw that it was in the release notes. And then when I came over to the action panel, I thought, well, it looks pretty similar to the way it did before, actually. And so my heart sank a little bit. But as I've dug in, it's raised a little bit again. So they have actually made some improvements. So what we had before is, first of all, these down this column here are the different plugins. Previously, they were in a row along the top. So they changed the position of it. And when I say my heart sank a little bit, it's because it still seemed to me that they had a very similar layout to the way that they got before. And this was one of the issues that I had with the previous versions of the software. If you want to assign, for example, a keyboard shortcut to one of the buttons previously, and still it is here now like this, but there is an easy way it will come to, you would have gone down to, let's say, keyboard. And let's say you want to type the keystroke, I don't know, command K. This one's for Keely. Command K. Then you'd have to go down this list and alphabetical order is logical at times. But it's not logical here because as I scroll down looking for the K key, and this is the way we had to do it before, you go through all of these different things. And first of all, they all begin with the word key because it's telling you it's a keystroke. But here, like we've got the E key. And then you would think what comes after E? It would be F. Well, actually, no, it's N then equals then escape. Then you've got FG. No, it's F1, F10, F11, F12, F13, and so on. So although technically, yeah, they've just been ordered alphabetically. It's not the most logical way to do things by any stretch. And I always thought, wouldn't it be so much simpler if we could just drag and drop an action like you can do in Stream Deck, and then you select and the action would be keystroke, and then you select what the keystroke that you want to be is. And so it was never really obvious exactly how you would do that before. And this I feel just sort of clutters up the space. You could obviously also search, but let's say we were searching for the K key and I just typed K in there. Well, unfortunately, it has very kindly highlighted every K in every action because every action begins with the word key. So sometimes the search works and sometimes it falls down on things like that. So anyway, this is the way it was done before. I don't know why they've left all of these actions still in here because now there is a much simpler way to do that. And there's a couple of ways of accessing it. So first of all, clicking up here in the custom, we did have this custom before. I feel like they've really simplified the layout of this now, though, because as well as having all of your stored custom actions, so ones that you've created before are down here, they do have these kind of shortcuts as well at the top to all of these common things that you might want to do. And it really does cover a lot of the uses that you might have for the loop deck as well. So for example, here we've got shortcut. So the example that I was just talking about command K, if I just click on shortcut here, it brings up this extra panel at the bottom, which is where we're going to create the shortcut. So I could come down here and I could just type the letter K. Do I want to add a modifier? Yes, I want to put command. So now that is now command K. And let me just type in here. Let me just put in Keely here like that. So then if I could add an icon to it as well, I won't bother with that just for now. So then I click on create and then I close that down. And you can see now in my custom stored actions, we've now got this custom action, which is command K basically. And I could now drag this and drop it onto any particular button. We've also got a really easy access to go to a web page. So if you want to create a shortcut for a web page, we can do that there. Let's just do that like that. So now we've got a shortcut to the take one tech web page, click on create, and then also an application. So this is one that was a bit of a sticking point for me before was if you come into the desktop actions, the ones related to the system, we've got this activate here which sounded like, you know, activate an application and indeed it could activate audition, illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and so on all the creative suite apps. But there wasn't one just a generic, you know, open any other app. There was a way to do it, but it was a bit laborious. But now we've got in here this one down here run application. So now if I wanted to run, well, let's just pick an application of the folder. It's just happens to go on to Premiere Pro. So click on that. That now is going to open Premiere Pro. One thing that is a bit of a shame, it doesn't pull in the application icon like you get in, in Stream Deck when you select to open an application, it just automatically pulls in the application. So click on create. And there you go. So now what I've got is I've got a few different app, a few different actions that I've just created very simply from here as well as the run for run application. You've also got a macro so we can create macros and also the dial adjustments. We had these before. This is what was in the custom before. We've also got text. So if you want to create a text snippet, press a button and it will just expand the text snippet. Again, like we've got on Stream Deck. That's easy to access now and then sound. So we can come and just pick a particular sound file and then it will play that as well. So we've got those very simply in there. We're going to create those custom actions. Then they are stored down here and then we can drag and drop. But what they've done is they've actually gone one step further. That's already an improvement on how it was before. But then what they've done is they've added this ability to just click on any button and actually we've got a shortcut in here to do all of these things as well. So macro shortcut, run, web page, sound, text and so on. So if I did want to just run a web page from this particular button, then it's literally just open up that panel down there, type in the website, click on OK. It's then automatically assigned it to that button. So you can actually just go through here creating actions directly from the button. So in some ways that's even more streamlined than I was hoping for. That is a great improvement to the user interface. It's one of the biggest sticking points I had. It was the reason why I could never really recommend this device to friends and family. I'll always recommend the Stream Deck. It's so easy and intuitive to use. However, this was a bit of a sticking point that I felt like. It was just, I just knew I'd be getting tech support questions with it because it baffled me for a while, but this is an improvement. Let's have a look at some of the other things that they've improved then and then we'll get onto where I think they still need to do a bit of work because I'm still not going to be recommending it, I'm afraid. So one thing that I mentioned in that little intro was you can change the color of these buttons. It's these buttons down here. Previously, they just automatically assigned whatever colors to these buttons, but now you can see we've got this little color picker. Just hover over any of these buttons. Click on here and then we can just choose any color that we want for the button. So that's just a nice little bit of customization and the way that that changes is if I just show you, there you go. So we now got the little red button is just there. It's the color that's showing up in the center where the number is on the button. That's where that actually shows up. There they show it obviously around the outside. It would be nice if the buttons did glow like that around the outside, but actually it's the number in the middle. But anyway, that's how you change the color. So what else have they changed on here? They've also got the dial adjustments as well. So we can create a new one of those and assign it to the dials. It isn't much easier as well now to actually just drag and drop these and move them around. Whereas before it was a little bit more tricky than that. But one of the areas where I think that this is still just well, really falling down for me. I'm sorry to bring a little bit of negativity into this, but technically we've got all of this power here for all of these different applications. And I think that the way that they've got this set up in terms of the plugins and the access to them, the profiles and the workspaces and pages is a little bit unnecessarily bloated and also prohibitive in terms of setting it up exactly as you want to use it. What am I talking about? Well, comparing to Stream Deck once again, and I'm sorry to keep making the comparison, but I feel like Stream Deck have nailed so much that this is falling short on. It's a worthy comparison. In Stream Deck, you've got different profiles and then you've got multiple pages within those profiles. So a profile being a particular use case you've got for it and then pages being different sort of pages of here. Like over here, I've got page one. I've got these icons. I've got these icons on page two, page three, page four and page five. So I've just created a little blank one here. So it means you can swipe through and I can do that with my finger, just swiping on the device to swipe through pages. And then this is just a single profile. Well, in Stream Deck, in a loop deck rather, they've also got these things called workspaces. And to me, a workspace is more like a kind of profile within a profile. So although I'm in what I've called Alex profile, I've just created another one in here called Zoom. It's actually just blank, but it's effectively almost just like another profile. So I can just swipe between those different pages. Now, if I want to use some of the other applications that I've got plugins for the loop deck. For example, we've got plugins for After Effects, Adobe Audition, Final Cut Pro, Illustrator, Photoshop, and all those kind of things. And in fact, they all come built in and these profiles have been custom made for you, which in theory is great, isn't it? If I go over to the, let's just take Adobe Audition. So I'm now in the Adobe Audition profile and we are in the Adobe Audition profile. And we're in the Home workspace. And in the Home workspace, we've basically got these few actions. Now I can then go over instead of Home, I could go into Editing. So if I was doing some editing, then it would go into the Editing workspace. And as you can see in the Editing workspace, we've got nine different pages of actions. So I can just swipe through all these and we can see all the different actions that we've got in the Editing workspace. And then we can go over here. We can go to the Track States and Mixer. So as you're changing around in the application, it's opening up all of these different things to you. You can see how many, surely hundreds, over multiple pages and in multiple workspaces, you've got hundreds of different actions that you can use with Adobe Audition. And indeed, if you come over to the side here, you can see in our list of plugins, we've now got the Adobe Audition plugin there. And look at all these. These are all the actions that in theory, we can trigger with our loop tech. So that is great. It's just like, isn't it, in the Stream Deck where you can download a plugin, you can open the plugin and you've got all of the different actions at your disposal. The only problem is with Ecamp with, I should say, sorry, with Stream Deck, if I have the Ecamp Live plugin or I have the Soundboard or I have the Zoom plugin, I can still create any profile that I want and use all of those different actions. However, if I want to create my own custom profile and use these Adobe Audition actions that have been created here, I can't actually access them. So if I come back to my main profile, let's say I just want to create my own profile that's got a few actions for Adobe Audition, few actions for Ecamp Live, few actions for something else, spread over a few different pages. Well, guess what? I can't actually access those Adobe Audition plugin actions. You would think if I came up here to where the little plugins toggle thing is up here, you would think I'd just be able to toggle it on or off just like I can toggle these ones. These are a few of the built-in ones for MIDI, Spotify, Twitch, Phillips Hue and so on. I can toggle those on or off here just like you can do in the Stream Deck, for example. So in Stream Deck, I can come over to the little toggle and there you go. I've toggled OBS off, but if I did want to see those, I could toggle them on and then they would just appear at the bottom. I can come in here, I can toggle them off and they disappear again. So we've kind of sort of got that functionality in the Loop Deck because I can toggle these ones on and off. But where are the Adobe Audition ones? Where are the Adobe Photoshop? Where are any other plugins? You can come up to this little cog wheel up at the top here which is the overall settings for plugins. Click on that one and that brings in the add-on manager for all of the different plugins, the add-ons. And you can see here that it's telling me that all of these things are ready. I've apparently got the Ableton Live is ready, the Adobe After Effects is ready, the Audition is ready and so on. So these things are all technically ready to use and yet they are nowhere to be seen and certainly nowhere to be able to access them from here just in this profile that I'm creating themself. They've kind of really just sandboxed all of these different actions that they've created within these profiles that they've created. Now, the way that they are envisaging you using this is you're going to have this thing called Dynamic Mode switched on and it's under this heading called Application Profiles. So under Application Profiles, if you have Dynamic Mode switched on then as you are switching from one application to another it will be switching the profile to the profile relevant to that application and then you'll have access to all of those actions which is fine if that's how you want to do things but I just personally don't want my street, my loop deck I should say, switching based on the application I'm using. I want to be able to set it up as I want it with whatever actions I want to have in there so that I can have full control over it. Why is that such an issue? Well, I spend a lot of time on Zoom calls and I'm often using some of these creative apps whilst I'm on a Zoom call. So it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that I want to be able to have my Zoom controls on the screen whilst I'm on a Zoom call and just because I've opened up one of the creative apps I don't want it just automatically hopping over to all of the actions for that particular app on my loop deck. I don't necessarily want it to change profile. I'd just like to be able to set it up the way that I want it with all of those actions and the fact that they are all technically there somewhere they're all in the software it knows what all of these actions are but I'm just not able to physically assign them to any profile I want. Just seems a little bit short-sighted and by a little bit, a little bit I mean a lot. It's actually led to me not really using the loop deck. I use it only for e-cam live basically and so I have this set up as my profile for e-cam where I can control audio volumes my audio levels I should say and then it's really more of a companion to my stream deck and in fact, if we have a look at this it's mounted above my stream deck so this has got some extra scenes in e-cam live that I use. I've got this one to end my recordings these control some of the levels in e-cam itself but the stream deck does most of the heavy lifting and it certainly does all of the heavy lifting as far as my productivity is concerned and why is that? It is because not because it is necessarily better as a device than a loop deck it's because of the friction involved in actually setting things up. If I want to set something up just quickly and know that I can just easily hop in and out of different profiles with as I come with the stream deck it's so much simpler for me to do it in there and so when it comes down to it having both devices has been great using those dials but I still always defer to or revert back to the stream deck and when it comes to recommending one of these devices to people should they get a stream deck? Should they get a loop deck? If you need the dials for precision control of certain things in creative apps if you have a user of creative apps definitely recommend the loop deck for that if you're just really focused in on those apps all the time certainly the dials are handy for that but for just general use it's going to be stream deck every time for me so I'm really looking forward to future updates because I feel like they've made some steps in the right direction but they just still need to sort out some of these usability issues in my mind it's very telling that I know quite a few people who have bought loop decks and more than half of the people that I know who have bought loop decks have sent them back so it's not just me who feels this way unfortunately so it is a bit of a shame but as I say it's all steps in the right direction so I hope that you've found this little overview of some of the new features helpful and hopefully it is a sign of more future positive steps to come now I'll leave a link to some of my other videos related to loop deck and stream deck over on the right hand side as well so I'll see you in there