[yoshimi] Re: Top Line reorganisation

  • From: Victor <victor@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: yoshimi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 05 Nov 2015 00:24:31 +0100


Le 03 Nov 2015, Will Godfrey <willgodfrey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> a écrit :

[...]

Hmmm. I wonder if 'Instrument' should be called 'Patch'. It would make 'Patch Sets' more obvious too.

Good idea. I think it would make things clearer.
A solution for both things would be to group everything related to instrument choosing under the same menu. Something like:

Instruments * Load * Save * Clear --- [some visual separator] * Banks * Root paths

That's where we started!

Sorry :-/
[...]

I tend to have the mixer panel open all the time and use that, and again click on the name. You can very quickly jump between parts, and can see all of them at once. Also I prefer to use right click to look at banks, and right click on my selection, and also then right click on my instrument choice. This gives you least clutter of open windows.


Interesting. I’ll give it a try.
[...]

I very often use recent patch sets. I've made almost no use of scales, but I can see value in being able to pick up recent ones. State - less likely. Would I want a recent instrument? There are a few I use a lot, but then its probably quicker to pick them out of the window (as I'd know where they were if they were often used). I think implementing the missing 'recents' would be tedious rather than difficult.

I suppose the usefulness of Recents depends on the number of items one has on disk and whether they are all in the same place or not. I switch scales and states quite often. But I don’t have a lot of them, and they are all in the same folder. So it’s true that for me, the file chooser is just as quick and straightforward as a Recents dialog would be.

I understand it’s probably overkill to go the systematic way and implement recent/clear in all the menus. I suggested that initially because I remember that as a newcomer, the architecture of what could be saved and loaded was a bit confusing to me. But I think renaming "instruments" to "patches" would already solve part of it.
IMHO another quick enhancement for the menus' logic would be to opt for either plural or singular throughout "Instrument", "Patch SetS", "ScaleS", "State".

Patch sets could be used as a model, and the paths stored in yoshimi.config in the same way.

Clear is an awkward one. Clearing just an instrument is very useful if you are creating a new one from scratch, but otherwise has no value at all. Simply loading a new one automatically applies the 'clear' operation first. I hardly ever use it.

I don’t use it either. I usually start from an existing instrument, and if things go wrong, I reload that instrument to start over again. I don’t know how useful the "Clear instrument" operation is for others. If it’s not, maybe it could be removed from the Instruments menu. It’s the only one where it appears, now that the Reset button was created. (Gosh, I’m being systematic again!)


I can see the value of clearing scales - especially if the scales window was moved to the view menu. However, it should really not just disable microtonal, but also restore the default scale.

You’re right. So that would be: disable microtonal + "A freq = 440" + "A note = 69" + disable "invert keys"
I’m not actually sure how useful that would be though. If you have deliberately set some specific scale, you probably know how to get back to the default one too (and it takes just a couple of clicks). At this point of our discussion, I’d rather think it’s not so useful to create another Clear operation for that.

Originally, for patch sets the 'clear' operation simply stepped through all parts and set them to the default sound, but this left less obvious parameters such as scales, controllers, part volume etc. unchanged, causing great confusion. It slowly expanded until (with one last recent addition) it could genuinely be called 'reset' :)

Although reset could reasonably be put inside 'State' I think it is now important enough to have its own button. I use it quite often.


Anyway, thanks for your ideas. I think we'll certainly end up using some of them :)

Thanks for taking the time to consider them!

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