LinuxMusicians

ssj71 wrote:Looks nice. I personally love white on black. Good work. A few suggestions:

-If you could put the synth icons as the links on the front page instead of just text it would look nice.
-Having one demo autoplay when you open each synth's page might be good too.
-I like the audio samples, but a video would be good too which would help people learn how to use them and generate their own sounds.
-Linking the ogg files is ok, but it gets awkward to listen to all of them (click, listen, click back, click, listen...) If you could get some sort of embedded player so that you can listen to all of them in a row or at least not have to load a new page it would be a little easier.
-Also some subtitles would break up the long text and make it more digestible (i.e. about, creators, samples, banks). Use a standard format so its easy to go between synths.
-The screenshots are good, but you could probably shrink them a little smaller so the reader doesn't have to scroll so much and gets a better overall picture. You may even want to put one screenshot, then text, then at the bottom have a more screenshots section. i guess I'm thinking it should be more like a wikipedia article with a basic summary and image at the top with more details following. Maybe thats not the direction you want to go, but I guess its what I'm used to.

I know some sites use the web traffic to generate funds so they would much prefer you link to their patches. I think the safe route is to link until you have permission from them to host it yourself.

I think I'm just generating a lot of work for you to do :/ Sorry. These are just some suggestions. Hopefully they're helpful. Its really cool that you are doing this!

Alwaysanewb wrote:I think any place people can get more info about these synths is pretty awesome. The site looks good too.

-Agreed about lots of clicking.. I'll have to see what free players (linux-based?) I can add... any ideas?

-I need to learn how to make images so that clicking them enlarges them.. then I could place them anywhere, not just at the top, like you say.

As far as links, perhaps that's best. I'll go that route for now, then if something disappears down the road, I'll consider posting the banks I have on this site.

DoosC wrote:Yes the look is probably perfectible but having all those presets in one place is just so cool ! Keep up !

DoosC wrote:I just had a look at synthmania, the layout is very simple, yet effective and brought me some reflexions after all :

- site name : amsynth is quite specific, it would be like synthmania was called multivox_mx-20 or something. What about a more generic name like linux-softsynths or softsynthsmania or whatever in the same spirit ?

- front page logo : it could be reduced to just a banner

- thumbnails : they could be clickable just as the synth name

- layout : insted of having the thumbnails in one column, they could be arranged in a grid (in 3 columns for example)

- welcome text : the font could be a little smaller and it could put to the left of the grid

As I said just some random thoughts...

danboid wrote:Hi Brian!

I agree with doosc about the site name - it would ideally be more generic if you are covering more than amsynth. Maybe you could sell amsynth to Nick for cost and buy a more appropriate domain?

There is no mention yet of my 2 fave Linux synths - TAL Noisemaker (from DISTRHO) and Loomers Aspect.

Also, I've noticed that the link for KXstudio (on the links page) erroneously says synthv1.

briandc wrote: -Agreed about lots of clicking.. I'll have to see what free players (linux-based?) I can add... any ideas?

briandc wrote: -The videos are definitely useful; I hope to make some in the future and even link them to youtube.. there needs to be lots more of this stuff on youtube, imo!

briandc wrote: -I need to learn how to make images so that clicking them enlarges them.. then I could place them anywhere, not just at the top, like you say.

<a href="path/to/image.png"><img src="/path/to/image_thumbnail.png" alt="Image of AMSynth"></a>

Heikki Ketoharju wrote:

briandc wrote: -Agreed about lots of clicking.. I'll have to see what free players (linux-based?) I can add... any ideas?

Nowadays there's no need for external players. Most browsers can play ogg-files straight. Check this: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_audio.asp

briandc wrote: -The videos are definitely useful; I hope to make some in the future and even link them to youtube.. there needs to be lots more of this stuff on youtube, imo!

Also there are good videos about ZynAddSubFX in Youtube, so you could just embed them! Here: http://www.youtube.com/user/zynaddsubfx

briandc wrote: -I need to learn how to make images so that clicking them enlarges them.. then I could place them anywhere, not just at the top, like you say.

Making images larger by click requires two images: one that's smaller and another that is bigger. Basically you just insert small image (often called as thumbnail) to the site and then wrap it to link element that leads to bigger image:

Code: Select all

<a href="path/to/image.png"><img src="/path/to/image_thumbnail.png" alt="Image of AMSynth"></a>

Remember that width and height attributes in img tag aren't meant to be used as rezizing image, but to just reserve space. Most of the images on your site were distorted because you have used width and height to resize images. That's not the right way: you should resize images to right size in Gimp or another image manipulation program, and then just insert them to the site without altering their size. That way they look sharp and clean. Hope this helps, and big up for the site! I'd really like to see some kind of "pros and cons" section with every synth.

briandc wrote: Hi Heikki,
thanks for the feedback.
- Yes, I see now that the .ogg files open in the browser's player, so I've left off imbedding a player.

briandc wrote: - The image enlarging seems pretty logical now that you explain it. Since I have the original pics in large size already, how do I resave them as thumbnails? (This would also resolve the distortion issue, since a thumbnail linked to the original image is sufficient.)

briandc wrote: For example: Hexter outputs in mono. Why? I suppose to "emulate" an old technology. Or maybe Sean didn't know how to include stereo capability. (But I doubt it.) So for whatever reason, I guess it's best to just appreciate them for what they are; if someone is able to add features, a fork, or whatever, I'll be more than glad to include it!