# "all" function mishap

**URL:** <https://uzu.lurk.org/t/all-function-mishap/5990>\
**Category:** TidalCycles\
**Tags:** questions\
**Created:** [9 November 2025 17:20 UTC](https://uzu.lurk.org/t/all-function-mishap/5990 "2025-11-09T17:20:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![waveholder](https://uzu.lurk.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/58f4c7/32.png) [@waveholder](https://uzu.lurk.org/u/waveholder)\
**Post date:** [9 November 2025 17:20 UTC](https://uzu.lurk.org/t/all-function-mishap/5990/1 "2025-11-09T17:20:43Z")

</div>

hi friends,

long time user of tidalcycles here and I was experimenting with the “all” function out of curiosity and now I’m not sure how to undo what I’ve done without rebooting Tidal.

I had several tracks playing and wondered what would happen if I ran:

all $ struct "1\*32"

I got the result I was looking for (sort of) – all the tracks had struct “1\*32” applied to them.

then I realized I didn’t have any way to undo it or revert all the patterns back to their original states. I could only revert back to the original code I’d written by rebooting Tidal and running the setcps function.

There isn’t really much documentation on “all” and searching for “all” isn’t really helpful and (big surprise) doesn’t yield any logical results lol.

I’m hoping someone has some info or use cases for “all” or how it could be effectively used without the obvious drawback of rebooting Tidal? I could see it being used in interesting ways if there was a way to restore all the patterns back to their normal states!

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![polymorphic.engine](https://uzu.lurk.org/user_avatar/uzu.lurk.org/polymorphic.engine/32/30_2.png) [@polymorphic.engine](https://uzu.lurk.org/u/polymorphic.engine)\
**Post date:** [10 November 2025 10:44 UTC](https://uzu.lurk.org/t/all-function-mishap/5990/2 "2025-11-10T10:44:22Z")

</div>

hi, every execution of `all` replaces the single global fx function (stored internally) with the passed function. This means you can pass it the identity function, which essentially ‘does nothing’. In short, you’ll just have to execute

`all id`

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![waveholder](https://uzu.lurk.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/58f4c7/32.png) [@waveholder](https://uzu.lurk.org/u/waveholder)\
**Post date:** [10 November 2025 19:27 UTC](https://uzu.lurk.org/t/all-function-mishap/5990/3 "2025-11-10T19:27:04Z")

</div>

thanks so much! definitely a lot of cool use cases here that I had never considered.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![jwaldmann](https://uzu.lurk.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/977dab/32.png) [@jwaldmann](https://uzu.lurk.org/u/jwaldmann)\
**Post date:** [11 November 2025 12:24 UTC](https://uzu.lurk.org/t/all-function-mishap/5990/4 "2025-11-11T12:24:08Z")

</div>

see also [https://club.tidalcycles.org/t/using-all/5853](https://club.tidalcycles.org/t/using-all/5853) (on how it's implemented)