Here is Roland_SC88.idf and a rant about work flow
Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2018 11:36 pm
I had to cobble this together and figured I'd make it available. Maybe I'm not the only poor soul still working with this hardware
While I'm here, I want to take a moment to make a feature request. I'm running 3.0.2 and am still learning my way around. Things look great and I'm pretty sure I'm going to enjoy the work flow. However, it's become clear to me that selecting instruments is going to suck. I really try and avoid the mouse (or rodent as I like to call it) at all costs. It's just slow and clunky and after a few hours, it just leads to that cramped feeling etc... it's just not an effective or efficient way to interact with a computer. OK, now that we're clear on that, I see how one can navigate through an instrument map once it's been assigned to a midi track. Click on the menu underneath the assigned instrument and a hierarchical menu pops out. This is (obviously) where people are probably expected to use the rodent but I did notice that the menu can be navigated with the keyboard by using the arrow keys. OK, not bad but here's where it starts to suck: The only way to actually send the corresponding Program Change event to the hardware is to hit the Enter key (or click using the mouse). At that point, the menu goes away. Now imagine you're trying to "browse" for just the right patch. You're forced to begin and endure this process over and over again as long as you feel the need to keep looking. What really would make this less "painful" is if the menu remained available until some action was taken to dismiss it. In other words, a good patch selector should hang out and allow the user to easily navigate through the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of patches related to the instrument. Just highlighting or focusing on the patch should send the PC event to the hardware since many times your right hand is on the keyboard (scrolling) and your other hand is hitting keys on a midi controller. In other words, you're "browsing". That entire work-flow just becomes a chore when you have to start from scratch every time. Are people really working like this when attempting to browse patches or am I missing something? Granted, I know most people are using software synths and I get how that could be a very different work flow based on the plugin. That said, I'm really limiting these comments to navigating instrument maps which are meant for interacting with hardware.
Here's the IDF mentioned in the topic:
While I'm here, I want to take a moment to make a feature request. I'm running 3.0.2 and am still learning my way around. Things look great and I'm pretty sure I'm going to enjoy the work flow. However, it's become clear to me that selecting instruments is going to suck. I really try and avoid the mouse (or rodent as I like to call it) at all costs. It's just slow and clunky and after a few hours, it just leads to that cramped feeling etc... it's just not an effective or efficient way to interact with a computer. OK, now that we're clear on that, I see how one can navigate through an instrument map once it's been assigned to a midi track. Click on the menu underneath the assigned instrument and a hierarchical menu pops out. This is (obviously) where people are probably expected to use the rodent but I did notice that the menu can be navigated with the keyboard by using the arrow keys. OK, not bad but here's where it starts to suck: The only way to actually send the corresponding Program Change event to the hardware is to hit the Enter key (or click using the mouse). At that point, the menu goes away. Now imagine you're trying to "browse" for just the right patch. You're forced to begin and endure this process over and over again as long as you feel the need to keep looking. What really would make this less "painful" is if the menu remained available until some action was taken to dismiss it. In other words, a good patch selector should hang out and allow the user to easily navigate through the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of patches related to the instrument. Just highlighting or focusing on the patch should send the PC event to the hardware since many times your right hand is on the keyboard (scrolling) and your other hand is hitting keys on a midi controller. In other words, you're "browsing". That entire work-flow just becomes a chore when you have to start from scratch every time. Are people really working like this when attempting to browse patches or am I missing something? Granted, I know most people are using software synths and I get how that could be a very different work flow based on the plugin. That said, I'm really limiting these comments to navigating instrument maps which are meant for interacting with hardware.
Here's the IDF mentioned in the topic: