Instrument drop-zone indicator

musikBear commented 9 years ago

Edited 2014-12-31 @tresf, added comments from @DeRobyJ's bug report, mockup of drag-zones

If you replace the instrument of one track by drag-n-dropping a plugin/preset onto that track, you've lost the old instument. Of course undo-redo will make this less harmful, but it would be great to have a pop-up saying like: "Are you sure you want to replace this instrument? The current one will be lost!"

Actions:

Yes - Do it like normal

No - Add a track with the dropped instrument

(Cancel - Do nothing)

[extra: if the old istrument of the track is the default preset, don't show the pop-up and do the "yes" action]

The way an empty instrument from sidebar, can be added to a project, can be problematic. Reproduce: Take any project duplicate a track until SE is completely full take any instrument from the sidebar ad add it.

Intuitively, a user will 'add' this new empty instrument to the project inside SE, but if that is done, the new instrument overwrites the existing preset that is closest to the mouse. Old users know, that the trick is to add the instrument outside SE -eg on the scroll-bar, but that is definitively not intuitive. I sugest some kind of 'safety' pop-up: _"Should this empty instrument _overwrite* this existing preset? y/n"* If the user says n, the new instrument is then added as last instrument in the project what do you think-

tresf commented 9 years ago

Yeah, this is a well-known realestate-expansion problem in the song editor.

P.S. your title and description could really be better.

P.P.S. don't use acronyms like "SE"

Title: Dragging Instrument to a "full" Song Editor

Description:

Expected behavior:

Dragging an instrument to a song editor should add a new track containing a new version of that instrument.

Actual behavior:

If there is no empty realestate to drag to or the instrument is dragged over an existing instrument track, the underlying instrument track is overwritten with the one that was dragged, potentially losing instrument preset information. See preview below.

@musikBear you've been on this list long enough, please step up the quality of your bug reports! :+1:

diizy commented 9 years ago

On 12/30/2014 06:24 PM, musikBear wrote:

pop-up

No.

tresf commented 9 years ago

On 12/30/2014 06:24 PM, musikBear wrote: pop-up

No.

Agreed.

Perhaps a contextual visual indicator (simplified mockup to illustrate the drag zones)

diizy commented 9 years ago

On 12/30/2014 07:47 PM, Tres Finocchiaro wrote:

On 12/30/2014 06:24 PM, musikBear wrote:
pop-up

    No.
Agreed.

Perhaps a contextual visual indicator (simplified mockup)

Could work, seems kind of troublesome to implement though.

tresf commented 9 years ago

Could work, seems kind of troublesome to implement though.

Yeah, agreed... I'd expect the implementation to leverage the drag thumbnail for starters, as overriding all of the paint events could get messy... perhaps use a highlighting method on the hovered-over a widget (or its parent, respectively)

Spekular commented 9 years ago

Duplicate of #60 if I'm not mistaken?

tresf commented 9 years ago

Duplicate of #60 if I'm not mistaken?

Thanks, done.

musikBear commented 9 years ago

A quite simple idea, could be to not have dragging at all, but to simply only add empty instruments through a context-menu

Open as new in BB
Open as new in SE
Send to active instrument in BB
Send to active instrument in SE

Problem fix, and consistent with context in Presets

tresf commented 9 years ago

@musikBear, to be fair, consistency with presets would include both dragging AND context menu.

Sti2nd commented 9 years ago

I think this is logical and will solve the problem. Dropping on top of the instrument, represented by its icon and the instrument track will replace. Dropping on top of the segments (notes) will add new instrument.

new_replace_area PS: I shouldn't have outlined the B&B track, it should be a normal instrument track.

alexgleason commented 6 years ago

I'm on 1.2.0-rc5 and for the life of me can't figure out how to replace an existing instrument. Dragging on top of the instrument always creates a new one and I can't find any dialogs to replace the instrument. I'm guessing this has changed?

EDIT: Correction, you can still drag instruments, but you can't drag samples. You have to right click the sample and choose "Send to selected instrument." Consistent UX between the two would also be nice to have and is somewhat related to this issue.

musikBear commented 6 years ago

@alexgleason even though it is not agreed in this thread, using context-menu is the way to go. You can do this:

In song-editor, click the instrument-buttons of the instrument you want to replace. That will make the instrument pop-up and show you the UI for that preset. That is now active-instrument!
go into sidebar| myPresets, and browse to the wanted preset
Right-click it
choose option 'send-to-active-instrument' This will swap the wanted preset into the active one. Job done!

DeRobyJ commented 6 years ago

but you can't drag samples.

You can drag samples inside AudioFileProcessor!

LMMS / lmms

Instrument drop-zone indicator #1531