Topic: Preview 2.31: Slide/zoom key shortcuts

Well, here’re some quick thoughts from your resident nitpicker. 🙁 😛

First things first… the rounded edges and velocity-height relationship are a matter of taste, I guess – not exactly my favorite change ever. Have to see if I can warm up to it… 😉

The note row highlighting – besides that it isn’t consistently bright on white and black rows – doesn’t really serve much purpose, and will most of the time clutter the view, in my opinion. I can see the use when hovering over the keyboard, so you get an indication of which notes would be selected.
Notes themselves are highlighted as well, but just barely noticable. So I wonder why at all, especially since you seemed to step away from highlighting individual elements since the new group panel.

Lastly, I think I’d prefer an extra button instead of a menu entry for toggling between piano roll and drum map, for the reason that it’d be more immediately noticable.

Edit: Umm, I must also say that, while the ‘wide event’ mode is a good idea, it doesn’t work as well as Liquid showed in FL Studio (for the purpose of selecting short notes). It still only leaves 1 px to select a really short note, while the resize handles are at least 4 px wide…
Just an observation. I usually don’t use the pencil tool myself. 😉

Bug: there seem to be weird things happening to the key ‘zones’ when some notes/keys are disabled:

@LiquidProj3ct wrote:

Well I think it’s useful, not to see the key, but to see other far notes that’re in the same row. You could adjust easily relative pitch between notes that’re pretty far, of course, it depends of the music you’re doing 🙂

I guess so, though I can’t see a personal use for it at the moment. I just hope there’s nothing similar planned for the arrangement view, as I feel that it’ll quickly get annoying if everything under the mouse cursor is highlighted and jumps at you.

@Zynewave wrote:

The benefit of the rounded edges, is that it’s easier to discern start and end of individual events, if you have a series of joining 16th notes for example.

Honestly, I think the difference is pretty small. It’s just an aesthetics thing for me, so don’t mind it unless others dislike it, too. It is easier now to discern overlapping notes (it sometimes looked like there were three instead of two notes before), I’ll give you that.

What annoys me more is the note height now being dependant on velocity levels. This was fine for me in the drum map, where you would probably hide all unused note rows, so the vertical zoom level can be set higher – there’s no doubt that it’s useful in this case.

In the piano roll – with a little higher than default zoom level – the differences are so marginal that I’d rather have full-height notes back instead of sacrificing even a little visibility for something that conveys no information to me (or at worst even ends up confusing, as there’s no guaranteed equal spacing between notes on different rows anymore). Besides, I think the note coloring already does a perfectly fine job at this by itself.

Is it not sufficient that the width of the box increases when you zoom out vertically?

Well, that’s not very obvious now, is it? 🙂
I’ll let you and Liquid work this one out as I don’t experience the problem myself. I just mentioned it because, since I already was giving negative feedback, I thought I might as well take the blame for getting on your nerves with this. 😆

Something that seems to have fallen under the table, or maybe was never mentioned, is the possibility of reordering keys in the drum map. For example, the standard GM mapping has hi-hat strokes and tom-toms on alternating keys (probably because it’s easier to play?). If you don’t use an actual keyboard to play drums, though, you might want to have all of one instrument’s articulations placed next to each other in the drum map. Maybe in a future update? O:)

@Zynewave wrote:

And more adjustments to the pencil tool on events: When the event is thinner than 16 pixels, then the resize handles are removed from the bottom half of the event. This means it is easier to move the event, and the event can still be resized by pointing to the side edges on the upper half of the event. Perhaps it sounds confusing, but I think it works alright.

Now I can move events very fast, without struggle. It was a very intelligent idea, thanks! 😀

Furthermore, I’ve added a resize area on the upper edge of note events, for dragging velocity. I’ve done this because I plan to remove the “drag velocity or size” Alt+Click option. This never works reliably for me, as I probably 1/3 of the time accidentally drag a pixel in the wrong direction of what I really want.

I don’t use it either, I use alt+click to delete notes, but… why not allow two movements (velocity & size) while dragging, ie, if you’re dragging towards left then you drag size, but if you actually want change velocity you don’t need to cancel the operation just move the mouse towards up more than left, so it would work in the same way that ALT key while dragging (it restricts movement)

Now with current drum system I was working on new track templates but I see that editor status (as enabled keys / drum map mode) isn’t saved in template. Could it be possible?

It’s a little boring each time I looking for inspiration for a new song open Poise or Nepheton go inside a menu and select “drum map mode” and then the enabled keys instead starting to write notes right away