Zynewave's Forum Page

@ronin wrote:

Hmm I think the source & input buttons are too big..

Do you mean the height of the controls, or the extra space used by the rounded edge?

I’m going to remove the object icons (‘fx’ etc.) shown in the mixer selectors, so that there are more room for the name of the object.

I also have plans for adding a strip width zoom button to the mixer left edge panel. Clicking this button will swap between two zoom settings. Dragging the button will adjust the width of the mixer strips.

@Zynewave wrote:

I expect to have a beta with the first mixer changes ready this weekend.

I ended up rewriting more than first planned, so I don’t quite have a beta ready yet. Here’s a screenshot of my progress so far:

Please post your comments on the new design.

Notice the old +/- track group icons are replaced with new round buttons.

I am undecided whether the slider knobs in the mixer (and rack and track headers) should assume the color of the background, or if they should be the default button color. What would you prefer?

Beta 8:

Renamed “Group Panel” to “Rack”. Calling it “Rack” will of course make more sense once I implement the embedded plugin editors.

Added a “Lists” option button to the inspector. This will toggle the object assignment panels at the bottom. If anyone has a better description than “Lists”, let me know. I prefer it to be a single word and short.

The track select button no longer doubles as track menu. Instead right-clicking on the selector will open the track menu. That way the effect track menus are also available on the track headers and eventually in the mixer strips.

The tracks region options are also done. You can select to show: gain/pan/send controls, effect chain, source selector and input selector.

Question to you all:

2.23 is turning out to be a major face-lift of the track UI. I’m guessing I need a couple of weeks to update the mixer to the new chain design. I wonder if I should delay the release of 2.23 so that it includes the changes to the mixer?

@thcilnnahoj wrote:

Edit: Ooh, there’s drag-and drop rearranging of effects on the track header! If possible, pop-up help should close as soon as you start to click-drag an effect track, otherwise you can’t see where you’re dropping it.

That’s fixed in beta7, which is now uploaded. Also the dragging up/down is modified slightly.

And something a little off-topic. I recently wiped the dust off an old laptop computer; it has a native screen resolution of 1400×1050… on a measly 14″ screen. 🙄
Text in Podium is awfully small that way, and changing DPI settings in Windows doesn’t help. This is no request – I’m just curious – have you ever thought about changing Podium’s font for a heavier one, or using the system’s font?

I am keeping in mind that, at some point I need to provide an overall size scale setting for the UI elements. Personally I’m excited about the new multi-touch capability of Windows 7. My next PC purchase will support some kind of multi-touch, either as a laptop/tablet, or using a standalone multi-touch monitor. In the wake of the Windows 7 release, there are a lot of new devices coming out that supports multi-touch.

So to be able to comfortably work with finger touching, I’m going to implement an overall “finger size” setting in Podium, which will adjust the size of all buttons. That way the user can easily adjust to whatever screen DPI is used with the touch interface. That is one of the reasons why I’m substituting the old flat group panel with the new resizable button style.

@LiquidProj3ct wrote:

About CPU usage. Podium, at least with one track, only use one core in my PC. Take a look to this screenshot, where I use Nithonat, Toraverb and Redoptor with maximun quality settings:

(click on picture until you see it at real size)

edit: I’m on Xp home, 32bits

It’s impossible for the host to split up the processing of a single plugin, or even a chain of serially connected plugins. The host asks a plugin to process a buffer of samples. It’s not possible for the host to split this up into smaller buffers, and then ask the plugin to process these simultaneously, because almost all plugins requires that samples are processed serially. Even a simple EQ plugin requires the processed result of the previous sample in its computation of the next sample.

If a single plugin should utilize multiple CPUs, it needs to be implemented in the plugin, which knows what parts of its internal processing can be performed in parallel. One example is the latest version of the NI Kontakt sampler. I remember reading that it now supports multiprocessing internally. It makes sense for a multitimbral instrument/sampler, because each voice could be processed separately.

@Malcolm Jacobson wrote:

I agree with others comments that the “Add new effect” button should be above the existing FX, and that the new effect should be added at the top, so the behaviour in the Group Panel matches the order of the Mixer.

By popular request, the “add new effect” (or “+”) button is now placed at the end of the chain.

I don’t understand the need for the Tick button. I like the information about the effect to be shown in the Inspector as soon as I click on the effect name. I don’t like having to click the “Tick” button as well. Can we add an option to hide this button and have the information automatically displayed?

I can’t see how I can avoid the tick/select button. There need to be an indication in the group panel of which effect track is selected, and thus which track is being edited with the object lists at the bottom of the inspector. I can’t see how I can combine this into the selector buttons. The selectors already use colors to indicate plugin open/close state. Clicking selectors are used to open menus or open/close editors, and you don’t always want the track to be automatically selected when you just want to open a plugin editor.

2. I can’t help but to think those shadows look a little exaggerated on brightly colored backgrounds, like the default blue for selections on Vista. I don’t know about your UI rendering engine, of course, but is there any way you could try something similar to rendering shadows with a different blend mode? You know, Like in image editors – multiply, screen, overlay… A “simple matter of programming”, surely. 😉

I agree that the shadows are a bit too agressive. I’ve toned down the button shadows in the new beta6.

In beta6 the effect record buttons are finally gone. The track lane record button will also record enable all plugin effect tracks.