Re: [LAU] User interfaces for Audio [WAS]: Re: ZynAddSubFX Usability Survey

From: Lorenzo Sutton <lorenzofsutton@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Sun May 01 2016 - 18:33:07 EEST

On 01/05/16 14:09, Paul Davis wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, May 1, 2016 at 8:06 AM, Paul Davis <paul@email-addr-hidden
> <mailto:paul@email-addr-hidden>> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Sun, May 1, 2016 at 8:03 AM, Lorenzo Sutton
> <lorenzofsutton@email-addr-hidden <mailto:lorenzofsutton@email-addr-hidden>> wrote:
>
>
> There's also an interesting user-experience corer to it. For
> example one thing I noticed in Ardour is when you open a LADSPA
> plugin window Ardour still 'grabs' keyboard shortcuts (e.g.
> SPACE to play, HOME to rewind); open an LV2 window and I'm most
> often hitting HOME to rewind just to discover I've set the
> parameter under focus (usually a shiny knob) to its minimum value :)
>
>
> You can disable this by clicking on the keyboard icon in the upper
> right corner of the plugin window. That will give the plugin window
> the opportunity to grab+use all keyboard events.
>
>
> Take 2: What I think you're differentiating between are not actually the
> same situation. I think (but am not sure) that when you refer to "an LV2
> window" you are talking about plugins which provide their own GUI
> entirely, rather than the ones that provide a object that the host can
> embed in its own window. This design is now deprecated by many who work
> on and around LV2.

Yes that's the use case I was referring to, and just after scolding
myself with a RTFM, I actually saw that the keyboard icon is there only
on LADSPA plugins (at least on my system). An example of the use case
LV2-wise would be one of the Calf ones...

There's really no way for the "external GUI" approach
> to ever provide the same keyboard handling as the embedded approach. By
> comparison, on OS X with AudioUnits, there is no "external GUI" option:
> the plugin's only choice is to provide an embeddable object, thus
> allowing the host to control and provide for a consistent keyboard
> experience.

Up to now I must say that probably the only real use case for having a
(graphical) gui for plugins is maybe compression / limiting etc. where
you can see graphically when and how the effect is actually 'kicking
in..', although this could probably generalized.
Otherwise just parameters for me lets me really concentrate on the
(sometimes subtle) *audio* differences in tweaking parameters... But
again I'm probably a bit of a corner case user.. :)

Anyway, thanks Paul as usual for providing detailed insight.

Lorenzo

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Received on Sun May 1 20:15:03 2016

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