[linux-audio-dev] GUIless friendly applications

[Mario Lang]

"Dave Griffiths" <dave at pawfal.org> writes:

> Mario,
>
> Could you give some descriptions of a text based interface you would like to
> use for realtime control of a modular synth? The building of patches seems
> fairly easy (via a CLI), but I'm thinking you'd want a more direct control for
> actually playing the thing - mapping the parameters to different keys maybe?

Let me explain.  The building of patches is what currently
doesnt work at all, so if a cli is easy to write for that, that would help ALOT!

I think you shouldn't concern yourself with a realtime interface
for the blind. We'll handle this ourselves.  What is important
is that every vital and important bit of information is exposed
via a clean cli interface.  I can write my own realtime controllers
for such a cli pipe if I need to for instance, take ecasound.el,
it is nothing else than a emacs interface to the ecasound cli, and
it is already at a point where I created a special widget which can
"slide" by pressing + or - on it.

Whats important is that you expose information like
available plugins and their parameters also through
your cli, much like *-register and map-*-list in ECI.

Another thought is, controllers could easily be controlled
using MIDI CC, and infact I have a midi-keyboard.
We could also try and write a blind-friendly virtual
midi keyboard at some point...

So please dont concern yourself with things like "how should
a ui for the blind look like...".
If you offer a truly complete CLI to your program,
and document it + some examples, we'll be able
to work on from there...

Otherwise, if you really wanna try to write a ncurses-like
realtime interface, just do it, if you can cope with it,
I can too :). The only thing which is important
is that there is a cli too...

P.S.: The CLI is not only good for us blind people,
there are alot of benefits for such an interface, think
scripting.

-- 
CYa,
  Mario | Debian Developer <URL:http://debian.org/>
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