[LAD] Mouse/knob interaction

[Gordon JC Pearce]

On Tue, 2010-09-07 at 22:35 +0200, Olivier Guilyardi wrote:

> That said, I reckon that adding a few knobs here and there looks cool :) It can
> bring some graphical balance and eye-candy, which may be very important. When
> you make music, the UI look & feel has some emotional influence on you.

I've said this all along - "photorealistic" GUIs for softsynths *aren't*
pointless eyecandy.  How the app looks materially affects the way we
respond to it and how we perceive its behaviour.  In an informal and
not-terribly-controlled experiment, I set up three versions of nekobee.
All had identical voice engines, the only difference between them being
the knob and background pixmaps.  One was the "normal" silver with
light-grey knobs, one was black with dark grey knobs, and one was a
plasticky-looking red with black shiny plastic-looking knobs.  Of the
four people who tried them, they *all* thought that the silver one
sounded smoother, the black one had a warmer bassier sound and the red
one had a more cutting, middle-y and distorted sound.

Now, if you want to use a "generic" host-supplied UI, that's fine.  If
you want a GUI that uses standard toolkit elements (GtkVScale, for
instance) that's fine too.  But - I think a softsynth has to *look* like
something you want to fiddle with.  Even if it's just a screenshot, it's
got to make you want to find one and have a shot of it.  Remember your
first gearlust?  It's got to do that.

As for little boxes with numbers, if I wanted to sit and fiddle with
those I'd go and work out my tax rebate on a spreadsheet...

Gordon MM0YEQ