Can OSARA provide contextual action feedback when hitting record with pre-roll enabled?

[ScottChesworth]

Just had a request via RWP for OSARA to report "pre-roll" when pressing record with that enabled. For consistency, I think the current report of "record" should still be spoken when Reaper transitions from pre-roll into recording proper. This would be included in the feedback that's controllable via our "Report transport state" toggle in OSARA Config. There's visual indication of that transition, so I reckon there's a strong case for providing spoken feedback for it, too.
Can we obtain relevant info from the API?

[jcsteh]

For consistency, I think the current report of "record" should still be spoken when Reaper transitions from pre-roll into recording proper. This would be included in the feedback that's controllable via our "Report transport state" toggle in OSARA Config.

The problem there is that report transport state by itself currently only reports transport states in response to an action; i.e. if the transport state changes due to some other reason, it won't get reported. This does work if you enable surface feedback, but some users may not want to enable that. We could potentially make it so that the surface transport state reporting happens even if surface feedback is disabled, but that would depend how reliable this is.

There's visual indication of that transition, so I reckon there's a strong case for providing spoken feedback for it, too.

That seems reasonable.

All of that said:

Can we obtain relevant info from the API?

It doesn't look like the API supports this at all. We don't even get a surface transport notification, but even if we did, we wouldn't know whether it was for pre-roll or normal playback/recording.

[jcsteh]

Support for pre-roll in the API was requested in this forum thread, but it doesn't look like there was any follow-through.

[LeonarddeR]

The problem there is that report transport state by itself currently only reports transport states in response to an action; i.e. if the transport state changes due to some other reason, it won't get reported. This does work if you enable surface feedback, but some users may not want to enable that. We could potentially make it so that the surface transport state reporting happens even if surface feedback is disabled, but that would depend how reliable this is.

We could consider splitting the surface reporting in multiple categories. Some surface reporting stuff is quite obnoxious whereas other categories are pretty handy.