Overview

4,000 recipe edits. 29 actual ideas.

If you build with recipes, your show quietly accumulates the same MAtricks settings over and over. The same phase sweep typed inline into dozens of recipes. The same “base plus one tweak” override repeated across hundreds of cues. It works, but it's bloated, inconsistent, and a nightmare to change later.

This plugin finds those repeated patterns and collapses them onto shared MAtricks pool items, so the same look is driven by one object you can edit in one place.

In my case I'd made 4,000 recipe edits over the years but had truly only made 29 different things. This scanner caught that, made those 29 MAtricks, and put them where they needed to go in one click.

What it does

Two kinds of repetition, handled automatically

It scans every sequence, cue and recipe in your showfile. There's nothing to configure and it works on any show.

• Inline recipes: MAtricks fields typed directly into the recipe. It creates a MAtricks holding those exact fields and replaces your hard-coded recipe values with the new one.
• Base + override recipes: where you reference a base MAtricks then tweak a field or two. It copies the base, bakes the recurring tweak into the copy, and reassigns.

In both cases it then clears the now-redundant hard-coded recipe fields, leaving your recipes lean and pointing at a clean, shared, nameable pool item.

Why it's safe

This is the part that matters

Every single recipe it touches is verified. It computes that recipe's effective output before and after the change, across all 28 MAtricks fields, and if anything would drift even slightly it is automatically reverted. You're never trusting it blindly.

Everything goes to the System Monitor and to a log file you can save. Always run it on a backup showfile first, just to test. It's careful and self-verifying, but better safe.

Preferences

Tunable settings at the top of the file

• SCAN_MODE: preview (the default) prints every recipe it would change to the System Monitor. Set it to false and it makes the changes for real.
• THRESH: how many times a pattern must recur to qualify (default 20).
• CAP: convert at most this many of the most frequent patterns (default 40), so a messy file can't spawn hundreds of items.
• SKIP_RNDM: leave random effects untouched (default on).

It reports exactly what it skipped and why (below threshold, over cap, or RNDM), so you can lower the threshold or raise the cap and run again to go deeper.

New pool items get compact auto-names like Sym X W4 or Line X Shf100. Rename them however you like afterwards; recipes reference the object, not the name.