On 30 8 2004 at 8:37 am -0400, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:

Speaking of the playlist, after lots of messing around in DB the other day putting together a new drum part for a song, I found more and more than I wanted to be able to select a group of sections in the playlist, and copy them to somewhere else in the playlist.

You can: select a few entries in the playlist, and option-drag them to where you want to copy them. Just like copying files in the Finder. :)

maybe I need a "consolidate sections in playlist to one big new section in the section list" feature?

Actually that's not a bad idea -- "make new section from selection" or something. This could be a menu command that could be applied to anything (whether it were a couple of selected bars, or several sections in either the section list or playlist).

so maybe a feature to group blocks of sections in the playlist so they could be moved around easily .... I realize that's complicating the interface, but it might be handy ....)

Like layer grouping in Photoshop? That's an interesting idea, but as you say, I fear it might overly complicate the interface. Worth thinking about though. -ben -- Ben Kennedy, chief magician zygoat creative technical services 613-228-3392 | 1-866-466-4628 http://www.zygoat.ca

On 31 8 2004 at 4:56 am -0400, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:

Well, gosh durnit, I hadn't known that about the Finder either :} I was selecting sections in the play list and smacking away at Cmd-C while DB yipped at me indignantly. Option-drag does it, all right!

Hmm... Copy is not implemented for the playlist, though it is for the section list. Would this be useful? If you did a Paste with the playlist highlighted, where would you expect the pasted sections to appear -- at the end? above/below/replacing any current selection?

BTW, is there some way to select a bunch of files and change the tempo on all of them, or to globally change tempo? (I know there's the little tempo slider, but I have difficulty figuring out what tempo I've actually ended up with when using that.) I was working on on a song at one tempo, and decided it was about 10bpm too slow, and had to change the set tempo in all the sections. But I must have missed a clue somewhere, rather like the Option-drag to copy ....

Nope, there is no simple way to do this. Perhaps a new menu command, "change tempo for selection" with sub-options for either absolute or relative change would be useful eh?

Actually, I had another question, which is about whether one could set "tempo overrides" in the playlist that superceded the "stock tempo" of given section list. [...]

At this stage, something like this would complicate the interface for questionable gain, I think. Having said that, it's a great idea for the next version, where this idea of overlays/attributes could become quite versatile. (e.g., select some drums and then apply an effect, such as "modify tempo" or "use swing rhythm" or whatever.)

Oh! Another random idea I thought of while Doggieboxing this weekend: Some feature that, say, would take a bar of 60bpm and cunningly convert it into 2 bars of 120bpm? And perhaps vice versa? Admittedly, thats a pretty odd and trivial kinda feature, but I thought I would mention it.

Yeah that's another good one. Let me take a brief tangent to describe how DB currently stores events internally: there's essentially a fixed-size array for each bar, consisting of a nominal number of subdivisions per beat. As you expand/ contract the grid, it provides access to these subdivisions on a power- of-2 or -3 basis. Tempo is stored as a scalar for each bar, as is the time signature, and so the timing of every hit is calculated based on these numbers. This is fine for general operations, but makes things a little more complicated when it comes to thinking about new operations like tempo or rhythmic skews, dividing or joining bars, etc. For the next version I have been thinking about a simpler but probably more versatile approach, where events are simply stored in a linear array with time stamps. Thus, doing math-related operations on bars (or arbitrary groups of notes, irrespective of bar boundaries) will become much more trivial. Things will need to get more complex on the other end, since the UI will have to now make interpretatiosn about beat/note/ subdivision/bar relationships for the purposes of rendering, zooming, presenting a grid and so on. But on the flipside it will allow things like quantizing and un- or re-quantizing after the fact in a non- destructive manner. Whew! Anyway, what I am getting around to saying is that I may hold off a bit to get to the type of features that you are describing, but they are definitely good ideas and are quite the type of thing I want to bring in to Doggiebox.

Oh, oh! ;) And another thing. The "mono/stereo" indicator on my install of 1C10 looks kinda odd, in that even when playing stereo one of the earphones is greyed out, though the "M" does darken up when mono output is selected.

Yeah I know that's the way it looks currently. Maybe it is a bit misleading. Do you think that fully-dark headphones (both sides) should appear during normal stereo, then have one go grey while mono? I guess that would make sense, since there is at least already an "M" to indicate what the button does. -ben -- Ben Kennedy, chief magician zygoat creative technical services 613-228-3392 | 1-866-466-4628 http://www.zygoat.ca

Ben Kennedy wrote:

On 31 8 2004 at 4:56 am -0400, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:

Whew! Anyway, what I am getting around to saying is that I may hold off a bit to get to the type of features that you are describing, but they are definitely good ideas and are quite the type of thing I want to bring in to Doggiebox.

That's cool. I was chucking into the ring all the little things I thought of whilst messing around with DB recently to see what folks thought. After all, some of the things I asked about seem to work already, and I simply hadn't known how to do it :)

...

The "mono/stereo" indicator on my install of 1C10 looks kinda odd, in that even when playing stereo one of the earphones is greyed out, though the "M" does darken up when mono output is selected.

Yeah I know that's the way it looks currently. Maybe it is a bit misleading. Do you think that fully-dark headphones (both sides) should appear during normal stereo, then have one go grey while mono? I guess that would make sense, since there is at least already an "M" to indicate what the button does.

Yeah, that's actually what I thought was gonna happen (I guess I didn't read the original posts carefully enough!). At least, with one headphone always greyed out even in stereo, it makes me wonder why the headphone is greyed out and what magical event might ungrey it! :) I feel like I'm finally figuring out more how to get the most out of the interface, especially in assembling patterns, hauling them around between dbsongs, and tweaking them. I was thinking of making a special dbsong of just a pile of basic patterns and variations and fills to use as a sort of "drum pattern library". Then I could rapidly pull basic sections from it to assemble a rough drum part for a song, and tweak them later when I had a better idea of what would suit the piece. Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/