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phon-ca / phon

Phon is a software program that greatly facilitates a number of tasks related to the analysis of phonological data.
https://www.phon.ca
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Add "Segment Duration" interface element to Session Editor and in reports #231

Open yrose opened 1 year ago

yrose commented 1 year ago

The element could be added to the left or right of the Play button. Ideally, the user should be able to copy this value.

To add this information to reports may involve more work; let's discuss

ghedlund commented 1 year ago

Adding duration to Timeline: The 'tick' bar in the timeline is essentially reserved for 'makers' within the timeline component and I don't think changing this is a good idea and as I mentioned before including length on this line is messy. I recommend adding a secondary (always visible) 'tick' bar at the bottom of the timeline view which shows duration between markers (selection and current record.) We can even make it more like the Praat TextGrid editor by allowing playback when clicking on the intervals on this line.

Modifying how segments are displayed in the application and reports: This is a much more involved task. We need to choose a consistent format for displaying this information across the board, cherry picking components to change the format would be undesirable and confusing to the users. Adding options in multiple locations for controlling this behaviour would be cumbersome and time intenstive. Adding an option to add 'Duration' as a possible tier in reporting would be equally as time intensive.

I recommend adding an application level option for displaying segment times in either the format: <start>-<end> or <start>+<duration>. This would affect the display of all segment times - most things will be handled automatically and we would need to tackle issues in scripts as we find them.

yrose commented 1 year ago

Your comments are in line with my expectations. One option would be to have the segment duration as our default in the Session Editor and leave the begin/end values for Timeline.

The start/end value were indeed useful before Timeline but have always been impractical to play with. Timeline addressed all these issues super nicely. So having segment duration, or a choice between duration and start/end values in the Editor could be a nice compromise.

In any event, I do understand that this has ramifications. In this context, maybe there's even implications for how we write our data in XML files, so maybe we should wait until we update our format (a relatively high priority once everything purrs in ARM world)