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hydrogen-music / hydrogen

The advanced drum machine for Linux, macOS, and Windows
http://www.hydrogen-music.org
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Design of Playback track #1018

Open theGreatWhiteShark opened 3 years ago

theGreatWhiteShark commented 3 years ago

Hydrogen version * : 1.0.1 Operating system + version : Linux

I just used our Playback Track functionality and I was a little bit underwhelmed by the way it is displayed right now:

orig

Problems:

  1. The ruler is not visible
  2. The playhead is not visible
  3. One can not see, interact or toggle the Timeline although it can be either active or not
  4. The fader for the Playback track is not located in the Mixer and initialized with both volume set to 0 and muted

Possible solutions:

  1. How about we add the ruler at the bottom of the playback track scale

  2. The playhead I would make bigger and cover the whole playback track scale_playhead

While at it: how about we highlight all the patterns of the pattern group currently playing? It's more eyecatching than searching for the little playhead

scale_playhead_marked_patterns

  1. For the different speds of the Timeline I am not sure right yet. We could make a different ruler at the top (similar as for not having the Playback track active right now). scale_playhead_marked_patterns_tempo

Or it could be integrate in the bottom ruler

scale_playhead_marked_patterns_tempo

  1. I would like to move the Mixer fader for the Playback track into the Mixer. It does feel odd it is not present there. Maybe to the left of the Master. Instead, I would reintroduce the buttons of the Timeline. I would also initialize it not muted and with volume set to 20%.
mauser commented 3 years ago

Hi!

good points! The current implementation is quite rough, i was pretty happy to get it ready for the 1.0 release as time was quite short,as always :smile:

Just one comment concerning the awkward placing of the fader: At that time, i had the idea that it might be better suited at this point because you might be interacting a lot with it if you're building your drum track (turning it on and off or making it louder..). So i wanted it to be accessible without the need to switch to the mixer for every change. Just as you would turn the metronome on and off. But it now also feels strange to me, it seems that a hotkey for muting the track would also do the job.

theGreatWhiteShark commented 3 years ago

The current implementation is quite rough, i was pretty happy to get it ready for the 1.0 release as time was quite short,as always

No worries. It's awesome it does actually work right now :)

Just one comment concerning the awkward placing of the fader: At that time, i had the idea that it might be better suited at this point because you might be interacting a lot with it if you're building your drum track (turning it on and off or making it louder..). So i wanted it to be accessible without the need to switch to the mixer for every change. Just as you would turn the metronome on and off. But it now also feels strange to me, it seems that a hotkey for muting the track would also do the job.

For me the fader does feel like something the user will adjust just once. But for the mute button you are right. Well, since there will be no tabs anymore there could be two buttons for activating the Timeline and the Playback track. This way there is a button in the main window for deactivating the Playback track and one in the Mixer for muting it with both effectively yielding the same result.

theGreatWhiteShark commented 3 years ago

Another nuisance of the playback track is that it just plays throw the whole audio file while being in pattern mode. It would be instead nice to be able to select an arbitrary pattern group (column in the song editor) in which temporal bounds the playback track get's looped.