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rafalcieslak / vmodsynth

a modular software synthesizer
GNU General Public License v3.0
6 stars 3 forks source link

One-touch move-all knob #10

Open rafalcieslak opened 9 years ago

rafalcieslak commented 9 years ago

Modular synthesizers are cool to touch. So many knobs around, and tuning every single one of them affects the resulting sound. But mouse controls, precise as they are, will never feel as good as a real physical knob. This is why binding knobs to MIDI controllers is implemented - if one has any kind of physical MIDI device, they can use it's knobs to control a particular module. But before they can 'touch' the knob, it has to be configured/bound. This is nice for some setups, but not for experimenting.

The suggested idea would work as follows:

  1. The user chooses a single knob on the MIDI controller that will serve the special 'move-all' purpose. This is done once per session.
  2. The user sets up any path they want, and start playing.
  3. When the user wishes to move a knob on any module, that is not bound to any controller, they move the mouse pointer over it [hold the right mouse button] and rotate that particular special 'move-all' knob. The virtual knob on the module moves to the same position as the physical one is. No other virtual knobs move except for the pointed one.

This should give a quick, intuitive, easy to use way of setting knobs, that provides some kind of physical feedback. It's not ideal (for example: the physical knob would not update it's position when user points to another virtual knob, so when the user moves the controller by an epsilon, the virtual representation would "jump" to a completely different position), but it's much closer to the experience of working with a real modular synthesizer.

This idea might require some actual user-testing and heuristic evaluation, though.

blinry commented 9 years ago

I'd also like it if the mouse wheel affected the knob under the mouse pointer. That's kind of like the same physical interaction you describe: Move the mouse over a knob, turn a "real knob". (For us notebook users it's rather "stroke the touch pad", but oh well :-)

rafalcieslak commented 9 years ago

Wow, for some reason I was convinced this must have been already implemented. Thanks for pointing it out, mouse wheel support is such an obvious feature! I will be probably a good idea to track it in a separate issue (#11).