Patches, Slots, and Banks

A .hxc patch stores a signal chain, its modulators, and modulation assignments. A session can hold multiple patches in Patches.

Ctrl+S (Cmd+S on macOS) saves the active slot; Ctrl+Shift+S (Cmd+Shift+S on macOS) saves it to a new file. A slot loaded from a file, or opened via File > Open..., remembers that file’s path, so a later plain save writes back to it. A slot that was reset, duplicated, newly added, or loaded from a factory patch has no path of its own yet, so its first save behaves as Save As instead of overwriting anything.

File > Save Bank (Ctrl+B, or Cmd+B on macOS) writes every open slot, and which one is active, to a single .hxcbank file in one step; File > Save Bank As... writes it to a new one. File > Load Bank... replaces the open slots with a bank’s contents.

File > Open... also accepts .viz patch files and File > Load Bank... accepts .vizbank banks. Saving one of them keeps its file name and extension.

Factory patches are excluded from File > Recent Patches.

A slot can also be set as the startup default, from its right-click menu’s Set as Startup Default or from File > Set Active Patch as Startup Default, so it opens automatically the next time Hex Composer launches, in place of the one-OSC factory default.

Reopen Last Patch on Startup, under File > Recent Patches, is the fallback for when no startup default is set. A startup default always wins over it.

Related: Signal Chain.