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Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need

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Re: Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need

#51

Post by bolangi »

cpuguy83 wrote: post #3

Just an fyi to anyone making or thinking of making one of these: Turning a knob with a mouse is the worst interface I can think of. I don't know why audio apps/DAWs fall so hard on skeuomorphism here when the interface just doesn't make sense in the context.

Good morning. An expanding plethora of buttons, tabs, menus requires geometrical memory that may have nothing directly to do with the function in question. The first GUIs were designed that functions be "discoverable," however the size of haystacks in which these discoverable functions hide has grown exponentially, adding cognitive overhead, and increasing the length of apprenticeship needed to master the application.

A slick-looking GUI is a kind of ad for the app. As author of an accessible, terminal-based DAW app, I contrast remembering an incantation like 'add-track' or 'list-buses' with hunting around. These incantations can have shorter abbreviations, such 'lb' for list buses, and 'help bus' or 'h bus' to be sufficiently discoverable, easier for both implementer and user. And then to have hotkeys to bump plugin parameters +/- 1/10/100 etc. Probably I'm pissing into the wind to think the majority of users will ever choose this -- and GUIs do provide amazing facilities for many purposes -- but we do have a huge array of choices on linux, including this plethora of music creation and production apps. That is a big success, IMO.

Re: Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need

#52

Post by camtarn »

ofalkaed wrote: post #49
mjr00 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it fair to assume most mouses have a scroll wheel? Probably not, a lot of musicians develop on the go (planes etc) so they're dealing with built-in trackpads pretty often. You can still scroll but it's not as ergonomic.

This is one of the things which helped sell me on Thinkpads with their three physical trackpad buttons and trackpoint, middle click+trackpoint gets you your scroll wheel and it is quite ergonomic.

Huh, I had one of those Thinkpads and I had no idea that this was a thing!

Re: Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need

#53

Post by bandrami »

cpuguy83 wrote: post #3

Just an fyi to anyone making or thinking of making one of these: Turning a knob with a mouse is the worst interface I can think of. I don't know why audio apps/DAWs fall so hard on skeuomorphism here when the interface just doesn't make sense in the context.

I can't think of the last time I used a knob with a mouse; you usually map it to a knob on a MIDI device and the GUI just gives you visual feedback

Re: Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need

#54

Post by bandrami »

jrm4 wrote: post #24
mjr00 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turning a knob with a mouse is the worst interface I can think of. I'm racking my brain thinking of what a better interface would be for selecting a number between a range of values, where the number is a point on a continuum and not any specific value, and can't think of one. The equivalent "traditional" UX for webapps would be a slider control, but that's functionally the same and you'd be going against many year…

Is it fair to assume most mouses have a scroll wheel? Hover and use that? Do they do that?

I think it's even more fair to assume the user has a MIDI device with a bunch of knobs on it?

Re: Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need

#55

Post by masspro »

cpuguy83 wrote: post #3

Just an fyi to anyone making or thinking of making one of these: Turning a knob with a mouse is the worst interface I can think of. I don't know why audio apps/DAWs fall so hard on skeuomorphism here when the interface just doesn't make sense in the context.

Also they are horrifically broken if you use OS-level magnifier (ctrl+scroll etc). I don't know if this is the application devs' fault or not; I haven't investigated OS mouse warping APIs. Warping the mouse back to the center of the knob goes in a feedback loop with the magnifier and spams crazy mouse events such that every knob will immediately go to min or max. Really shameful accessibility fail that no one cares about.

Re: Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need

#56

Post by NikolaNovak »

londons_explore wrote: post #8

The real-time low latency multi channel audio streaming needed for musicians is awfully similar to the real time low latency multi channel audio streaming required for telephony. Yet somehow the two industries have pretty much entirely different tech stacks and don't seem to talk to one another.

Most telephony I've experienced has latency measured in seconds (if you ever call your friend or spouse sitting next to you it becomes very obvious :) vs audio recording and processing which is measured in milliseconds.

Additionally, from what little I'm aware of, telephony is heavily optimized for particular frequencies of human voice and then heavily compressed within that. As well, any single telephony stream is basically a single channel. A song may have dozen of channels, at high resolution, full spectrum, all sorts of computationally demanding effects and processing, and still need latency and sync measured on milliseconds.

So... Kind of the opposite of each other,while both being about processing sound :-).

Re: Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need

#57

Post by Slow_Hand »

cpuguy83 wrote: post #3

Just an fyi to anyone making or thinking of making one of these: Turning a knob with a mouse is the worst interface I can think of. I don't know why audio apps/DAWs fall so hard on skeuomorphism here when the interface just doesn't make sense in the context.

I use knobs everyday in my audio tools (with my track pad) and they're perfectly fine as long as they have three features:

1. Drag up/down to change value. 2. A modifier key to slow the drag for finer resolution changes when dragging. 3. The ability to double-click the knob and type in precise values when I know exactly what I want.

The problem with knobs on a GUI is when designers stay with them when there is a faster option. Like an opportunity to combine three knobs.

For example, the EQ on any SSL channel strip is a nightmare because they slavishly stick with a skeumorphic design of the original hardware. The hardware required mixers to use two hands to adjust gain and frequency at the same time, and then dial in Q on a third knob. Very tedious when you have a mouse.

When this is done right, you get something like FabFilter's Pro-Q graphic EQ. The gain and frequency controls are instead an X/Y slider that you can easily drag across a representation of the frequency spectrum. In addition you can use a modifier key to narrow/widen your Q. All with a single click and drag of your band.

Re: Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need

#58

Post by NikolaNovak »

harvey9 wrote: post #28
sroerick wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very interesting thought. I'm not super experienced with low level audio and basically completely ignorant of telephony. I feel like most people doing audio in music are not working at the low level. Even if they are creating their own plugins, they are probably not integrating with the audio interface. The point of JACK or Pipewire is to basically abstract all of that away so people can focus on the instru…

Regarding Zoom, music lessons 1:1 online are still pretty common. I would guess this won't hold up with multiple musicians.

Music lessons online are common (I've been in them) because they're largely single duplex. Student plays, teacher listens. Then teacher comments and demonstrates, student listens.

There are projects that aim to provide synced multi player jamming, but last I checked they are all based around looping. Human ear SHOCKINGLY does not lend itself to being fooled and will noticed surprisingly small sync issues.

I always compare it with photo editing where you can cheat and smudge some background details with no one the wiser, whereas any regular non-audiophile will notice similar smudging or sync in audio.

Re: Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need

#59

Post by mjr00 »

bandrami wrote: post #53
cpuguy83 wrote: post #3

Just an fyi to anyone making or thinking of making one of these: Turning a knob with a mouse is the worst interface I can think of. I don't know why audio apps/DAWs fall so hard on skeuomorphism here when the interface just doesn't make sense in the context.

I can't think of the last time I used a knob with a mouse; you usually map it to a knob on a MIDI device and the GUI just gives you visual feedback

Really depends on your workflow. Many, many successful musicians are entirely or almost-entirely "in the box" and use mouse+kb for everything. Doubly true when you're talking about mixing and mastering workflows where you're not usually going to be using a MIDI controller at all (but doing plenty of knob-tweaking).

Re: Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need

#60

Post by mimischi »

bolangi wrote: post #51
cpuguy83 wrote: post #3

Just an fyi to anyone making or thinking of making one of these: Turning a knob with a mouse is the worst interface I can think of. I don't know why audio apps/DAWs fall so hard on skeuomorphism here when the interface just doesn't make sense in the context.

Good morning. An expanding plethora of buttons, tabs, menus requires geometrical memory that may have nothing directly to do with the function in question. The first GUIs were designed that functions be "discoverable," however the size of haystacks in which these discoverable functions hide has grown exponentially, adding cognitive overhead, and increasing the length of apprenticeship needed to master the application…

Mind sharing your DAW app?
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