Paste from a spreadsheet

Most engineers already have the patch in a spreadsheet. PatchSmith reads it straight from the clipboard, guesses what each column means, and lets you correct the guess before anything is imported.

Steps

1. In your spreadsheet, select the patch — with or without the header row — and copy it.
2. In PatchSmith, tap Paste from spreadsheet… under the grid.
3. Paste into the text box. A preview of the first six rows appears, with a dropdown above each column.
4. Check the dropdowns. Each column can be Ch, Source, Mic / DI, Stand, 48V, Notes or — skip —. Change any that were guessed wrong.
5. Tap Import channels. A summary tells you how many channels were imported.

What the parser accepts

• Tab-separated text, which is what Excel, Sheets and Numbers put on the clipboard, and CSV with ; or , separators.
• Quoted cells, including commas inside quotes.
• A header line such as Ch / Source / Mic — it is recognised and skipped rather than imported as a channel.

How columns are guessed

• A column of one- or two-digit numbers becomes Ch.
• A column of x, ✓, yes, ja, 48V or on becomes 48V.
• Of the remaining text columns, the one with the longest entries becomes Source, the next Mic / DI, and the rest Notes.

Anything the guess gets wrong you fix in the dropdowns before importing.

What happens on import

• Rows are added to the current patch; nothing already in the grid is removed.
• Every imported row runs through the instrument recogniser, so colours, icons, low cuts and strip names are filled in as if you had typed them.
• A row with a channel number that is already in use is moved to the next free channel, and the summary says how many rows moved.
• Rows with no free channel left (the grid ends at 64) are skipped, and the summary says so.
• Rows without a source name are ignored.