When recording automation to a pattern, you need to have position follow to be activated; that’s obvious and required by the way it works.
On recording into the automation envelopes however, it makes no sense and leads to the following situation:
I have position follow off to edit the pattern while it is playing; now every time I want to record automation into the automation envelopes I have to activate position follow and deactivate it afterwards for editing the pattern.
This shouldn’t be neccessary and makes no sense either.
Everything that requires on-point value record requires pattern follow, not just automation points.
What you desire, worked in the past but also processed parameters at moments they were not desired, specifically regarding pattern effect commands controlling DSP effect parameters.
If you had an effect 01 and an effect 02 and you were controlling parameter 04 of effect 01 using effect code 1420 but desired to control a different parameter for effect 2, the minute you started to type 2, effect 4 of parameter 2 got a value of 32 ($20) (because changing 1420 to 2420 took care parametervalues changed instantly as well).
What is nasty about this situation is, that if that parameter was manually well tweaked and fixed, you had to figure out what the original value was if you were that lucky or retweak that parameter to figure out how the effect applied before you made that change.
It was even worse if you did not really tweaked the parameter but never noticed its default parameter.
Or even way worse:a wrong dsp number got entered and you actually even don’t know which value exactly got tweaked.
A whole topic in the past about this problem took care there was a mode implemented where this behavior did not persisted.
It has disadvantages as well, but not the risk of loosing your track of which changes are made where.
The point that was made here: You are in total control and not the program because the program cannot anticipate on personal desires. (That is just a generic limitation of any application.)
As Vincent already pointed out: This is expected behavior. Right now you have the choice if you want to “step edit” automations or not by either enabling pattern follow or not. If we would change this you could only do this by stopping the song.
Let me move this to the suggestion thread. We can of course freely decide how this should behave, but this needs discussion…