Personally, I think the ease of use of db is one of its major attractions and have not felt the need for the kind of sophisticated editing you describe, Ben. I'm usually happy to position the cursor and Insert a bar, copy a bar into that new space and and edit. Alternatively, if necessary, create a new Section, write it from scratch and move it into place on the Playlist. The Pasting question you raise is usually addressed in sequencing software by Insert, Add or Overwrite options, where the first creates a gap at the Insert point of the same length as the new section, the second simply puts the extra notes into an equivalent space on the same track and the third replaces whatever's already there. Again, not sure if I'd particularly want it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, IMO! Adrian PS Any chance of 96 divisions? .----- Original Message ----- From: "Ben Kennedy" <ben@zygoat.ca> To: "Doggiebox List" <doggiebox@lists.zygoat.ca> Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2005 8:27 PM Subject: [Doggiebox] Design challenges with beat-level editing
Folks,
I have been mulling over some design issues for some time now and I would like your feedback.
As you can tell from the latest builds, the UI is getting to the point where it is possible to select beats and sub-beats, as well as entire bars or parts thereof, for editing operations. In Doggiebox 1.2 it is only possible to copy and paste whole bars; in this next version the goal is for copying to be possible on a more granular level.
However, I am now faced with how to devise a UI that best works to achieve what we want, and there are a few subtle problems that need to be solved.
Copying and pasting whole bars is trivial because any given bar either exists or it doesn't, and they can be shuffled around or removed and created like tiles on a tabletop. But once you get to manipulating beats WITHIN those bars, some challenges arise.
For example, say you have a 4|4 bar expanded such that there are 8 total beat subdivisions visible (two per beat). In the current builds, you can select one of these beat subdivisions by clicking in the header with the "triangle" cursor. The question is, what should happen if you then perform a Cut?
Setting that aside for a moment, say you instead select two adjacent beat subdivisions which account for one whole beat of the bar. Conceivably, performing a cut could remove the beat, turning it into a 3|4 bar. The copied beat could then be pasted anywhere else, say into another 4|4 bar, causing it to become a 5|4 bar. No problem.
The conundrum is with sub-beat portions. In the first scenario, removing that subdivision would effectively pull an eighth note from the bar; should the 4|4 turn into a 7|8? Maybe... but what if, instead of being zoomed to two subdivisions per beat, we were zoomed in one more level so as to show triplets for each beat? The concept of removing one such subdivsion now becomes more complicated.
I can see two approaches to this problem.
One would be to restrict beat-level selection to whole beats only, rather than any arbitrary subdivisions as is possible in current builds. This would eliminate the geometry issue but would forego a lot of flexibility, kind of defeating part of the whole goal of more versatile editing.
Another is to change the semantics of the Cut behaviour so that instead of actually removing beats, it merely removes the drums that exist in the selected space (preserving the structure/time characteristics of the bar). Paste would then similarly "paste into the space" without adding any new time or beats to the bar(s) under the cursor. We would create separate commands for adding/removing beats.
To me, it seems that while each of these approaches has its benefits neither fully cuts the mustard by itself. For example, with the latter design, it would no longer be possible to delete a bar without using a secondary command. Perhaps a third approach would be to have two sets of editing commands, Copy/Paste Beats and Copy/Paste Drums, which would behave each of these ways respectively. This strikes me as dangerously obscure however.
Whaddyall think? Ideas, feedback?
-ben
-- Ben Kennedy, chief magician zygoat creative technical services 613-228-3392 | 1-866-466-4628 http://www.zygoat.ca
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