Re: [LAD] audio/midi app development

On June 15, 2010 02:40:30 pm James Morris wrote: Perhaps more importantly, be able to detect the exact time the notes occurred and be able to observe quick, short note or controller changes not visible by your eyes. If it is desired to visually observe events shorter than the screen refresh rate can show, how about a 'scope trace' or 'chart recorder' style box? Say 100 horizontal pixel positions on the graph represents 1/60 second (the refresh rate of most LCDs). Thus each pixel position represents 1/100 of 1/60 second. The vertical graph positions represent some data, midi CC value for example. Thus the entire graph box need only be updated every 1/60 second, or even less if say 200 pixels, representing 1/30 second, are used, and so on... If a graph is not desirable, say a knob or slider control instead, then another idea is to change the colour of the control indicating something quick happened, say for example a quick change to a new value and then quickly back to the previous value, which your eyes, and monitor, would not have noticed. It's an important change nonetheless, because your ears heard it. Perhaps some meaning could be conveyed through the actual colour used. Perhaps a digital number on the control face indicating how many events occurred. Although you might want to smooth this by only updating once per second for example. The idea is to 'latch' detection of short events, for longer display later. Because even if you had a monitor with a very high refresh rate, your eyes still aren't going to detect short events, so it's pointless to only display the event for just that brief period, no? But with those methods, it's a question of how often you want the control's colour or number to change, or even if you want to manually 'reset' them after having been informed of the changes. You could get fancy by making 3D controls, where the depth conveys some information. Say a knob which is actually 100 knobs stacked depth-wise. The 100 knobs represent all the changes during 1/60 second. You could rotate the whole assembly to view it as a sort of 'graph', or rotate it 'normally' to just show the front knob representing the most recent value. OK, well that's a bit far fetched, but... (Just a few ideas born while thinking of how to display live oscilloscope traces on an LCD monitor, so this discussion of displaying live data on slow refresh devices interests me...) Tim.