This is a very interesting topic indeed, especially when thinking about multiple mix racks.
My experience though is that it may get confusing for the user. I mean, it really feels weird that one needs to save and restore a show when connecting a surface, whereas I always considered the show to host the basic settings of the mixer.
It’s also very confusing that it makes a difference on which controller you restore a show. I feel it’s a bit limiting always to have to restore a show, whereas actually I just need my controller to identify itself to the mixrack.
If I understand you correctly you can make some changes concerning the controller in the show via the editor but then you have to save the show on a USB stick, take that USB stick to the controller and recall the show on that controller?
As I see it, I’d rather have the Mixrack ask every controller to identify itself (with a physical controller, that’s still easy at the moment as it’s only one, but that will change if I understand correctly) or in case of the virtual controllers (editors) to indicate what controller settings they want to affect/be affected by.
Thus far, I do understand that info concerning a controller always needs to be transferred via USB stick, and moreover, not a single saved show will 100% sure contains ALL the info of that show (if people start using personal editors for in ear monitoring their strip settings are only stored on their personal machines, they might, no they will get lost, that I know upfront, they are, well we are musicians in the end, not computer scientists)
Concerning performance, the controller could sync it’s settings with the IDR rack so that controller specific scene info is also kept in local memory as a cache memory. However when saving a show it would be so nice to know that you have ALL info concerning your show in one file, and not in several files depending on the number of controllers that you are using.
Maybe it could be like a website/cookie system, where most of the users info is stored in the central user database of the website, but the identification goes fast as at the webclient side the basic “login” info is kept. In such a case, a user could ID himself to the Mixrack as “Wouter Tilkin laptop” and get those settings IF if in the current show there is a “Wouter Tilkin laptop” known as a used controller (just like R72, T80, T112 and so on) if not the controller will need to login using another “account” or create a new subscription to the show. On the local machine, I’d store the settings… showID–>account USED
This even has some advantages as I could start preparing custom strips for my colleagues. I could make a “DRUMMER” custom strip assignment by logging on using a (new) “DRUMMER” account.
Dreaming now (but seriously, I already ran into this story a couple of times!)
Then when we start rehearsing and the drummer asks me “where the f*ck is this channel?”, I even don’t have to run to the stage, I just change account to DRUMMER (or using a delegate system 
) ) (if I’m allowed to, I won’t let the DRUMMER touch my settings for instance) and make the change in the strip assignment, and change the editor account back to my “Wouter Tilkin laptop” account…
Then at the end of the day I save the entire show on my laptop and on the internet storage (I don’t like using sticks all the time ) and I’m sure that if the drummer forgets his own laptop tomorrow and needs to use the laptop of our scene manager….. (it DOES happen ) he will still be able to get his custom strip assignment that we stored yesterday…
So my plead remains… please please, more central storage in the IDR… please? Make the Mix rack also the Show server
If that’s out of the question then I’d plead at least the scene names to be stored centrally and offer the possibility to store a fixed custom strip assignment as a seperate file.
The thinking goes on
PS: In fact when working with dual mix racks i would find it logical to see that one of them is the master where all info is kept, and the other one is just a slave.
Wouter
My prayers have been heard, Dante is coming!
