Hello Devin!

Your ideas all sound good, and I think a combination of video-tutorials and writing documentation is the way to go. I would gladly volounteer to do a basic tutorial if you teach me how to sample a synth through synthclone. For example, I have a synth inside LMMS (TripleOscillator) that I would love to sample and use in other apps. How would I go about doing that inside synthclone? (I guess the explanation would suffice for any synth connectable via a jack-midi port, right?). That could probably generate a simple tutorial of basic synth-cloning from me. I do however have to say that I within the next maybe two weeks have a pretty packed schedual, so I cannot promise anything timewise.

Another idea would be a forum, or a thread in an existing forum well populated by LAU's, making it easy to post instructions and/or tutorials for synthclone. Make it a community effort!

I will not be around LAC unfortunately.

Cheers!

On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 8:15 PM, Devin Anderson <surfacepatterns@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 8:44 AM, Gabbe Nord <gabbe.nord@gmail.com> wrote:
> This sounds like a very interesting software for me, but I have no
> experience with similar software, so I have no clue how I would go about to
> use this one, and I can't seem to find any tutorial on how to do it?

You're not the only person to bring up this problem.  There is very
little documentation on how to use synthclone, and synthclone could
benefit from input from user-experience experts to make the software
more intuitive.  Unfortunately, synthclone has been a one-person
operation up until now, and I'm not a user experience expert or
particularly good at writing documentation.

I would like to take some steps to rectify this problem.  Here are
some ideas I have:

1.) Make a video tutorial on how to use synthclone.

I'm considering submitting a drum kit to the Hydrogen Spring Drum Kit
Contest by sampling kits I've made on my external drum synth using
synthclone.  If and when I do, I'll create a video tutorial on how I
use synthclone to create the Hydrogen drum kit.

2.) Find some time to write documentation.

It might not be the greatest documentation ever, but it would be
something.  The problem is that I wrote the software, and probably
make some bad assumptions about what the user does and doesn't know
that someone with a fresh perspective might not make.

3.) Get other people involved.

I would love to have other people join me in helping to make
synthclone better for everyone!  So, if you are (or anyone out there
is) interested in contributing to synthclone, please let me know!

What do you think about these ideas?  Do you have additional ideas
that might help?

I'll be at the Linux Audio Conference this week, so if you're going to
be at LAC and have some ideas you'd like to discuss, please let me
know.

--
Devin Anderson
surfacepatterns (at) gmail (dot) com

blog - http://surfacepatterns.blogspot.com/
synthclone - http://synthclone.googlecode.com/