[LAU] SL vs FW -- was: Freewheeling, keyboard

[Jesse Chappell]

On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Gabriel M.
Beddingfield<gabriel at teuton.org> wrote:

>> GUI do you think would help the sooperlooper experience?  FW's gui is
>> very much tied to that app, regarding the waveform updating, etc.
>
> What's nice is that, out of the box, there's about 16 loops that I can have
> laid out in front of me, visually, to trigger or record or whatever. For
> someone just in to looping... FW gives a nice and fairly intuitive GUI.  No
> sync options, a MIDI implementation out of the box, etc.

Let me first say that I really like FW's approach to multiple
simultaneous loops.  In many ways I wish SL had a different design
than it ended up with.  Not needing to care a priori about the loop
count is really nice.

As for a MIDI implementation out of the box... doesn't that just put
the burden of configuring your hardware to match it?  I find that
setting/changing the bindings in SL (especially with midi learn) to be
a bit easier.  I could easily include a selection of default midi
binding presets with SL, if I thought there was some common setup that
would actually be useful to people.  Feel free to send me some!

> Also, there's a lot of overhead in adding a new loop with slgui.  Each new
> loop takes up a lot of screen space... and takes extra planning and abstract
> thought to set it up with a midi controller of some sort.

Indeed, that was the point of my previous comment, if you aren't going
to actually use a mouse on the SL GUI, then there should be a
performance mode that does away with all of that.  As for the abstract
thought to set up a midi controller, you might want to look into
bindings that make use of the "selected" loop, that way you can jump
between selections with some bindings (specific loop, or next/prev)
then set up all your other commands to be bound to the selected loop.

Some as yet unreleased new features actually make the
record_or_overdub command even more suitable for "one button
looping"...  if there is nothing in the loop it starts Record, then
stops record.... then when hit again thereafter it starts/stops
Overdubbing on that loop.  Do a double tap and it does an Undo.  Hold
it down (a long-press if you have note-like bindings with separate
press/release ability) and it clears the loop.  If record and overdub
covers your looping, you could just set up a button on your controller
for each loop bound to this.  Look for it in the next release.

jlc