2 Mar
2005
2 Mar
'05
7:56 a.m.
Frank Barknecht <fbar(a)footils.org> writes:
Good point. Unfortunately, small markets are even less likely
to care about these problems. As someone once said,
10 we are a
20 minority in a
30 GOTO 20
--
CYa,
Mario
Hallo,
Mario Lang hat gesagt: // Mario Lang wrote:
No, not really. In fact, most controls in audio are
actually bounded. If you choose a frequency for instance, it doesnt make
sense to go -1000000 or whatever. Same for filter Q or
other typical parameters. You mentioned transport control, which
is a good candidate for endless data, but I dont need that actually.
My point is, bounded data is much more common than infinite data,
so IMHO, the default behavour of a knob should be to NOT wrap.
I can always add simulated endless data later on.
But by default, I personally prefer non-wrapping behaviour. Anyway,
I guess it comes down to personal preference (and therefore
customisability :-), and I am probably a bit biased
since "wrapping knobs" is deeply hardwired in my brain to
"unusable piece of hardware".
I've demonstrated already that it is quite
simple to emulate
endless rotaries in software.
Yes, I've seen this and it indeed is a possibility for SuperCollider
or Pd (which I use) to make the Behringer work for ranges bigger than
0-127.
However thinking about your solution a bit more, it occured to me,
that it basically transforms the knobs to wrap-around knobs, carrying
the same accessibility problem you pointed out before. Aren't you
admitting by this, that wrap-around would be good to have? That's actually all I would have expected
Behringer to do in hardware
(similar to the Doepfer devices): provide a wrapping mode as an option
to customers. (Maybe they have this in their Windows software, who
knows.)
Thats actually quite possible, I didn't really check. There is
a wide variety of settings you can apply to the individual knobs and
faders (making them send note on/off, MMC and so on), so it might
as well be that you can enable wrapping for individual knobs.
But since I cant see that LCD, I cant edit presets.
And since their preset editor is Java, I cant use that either.
Oh, isn't is a really charming world?
However, the
wrapping problem is not that easy to overcome. Since I
do not have visual feedback, I can not look at the rotaries current
value and predict when I need to stop to turn the knob to prevent
wrapping. The day that infinite wrapping dials were introduced in
modern synths was the day accessibility died finally.
I remember, that one or two years ago Julian Claasen brought up a
similar question either here or when I met him in a person asking
about some hardware synth - I forgot which - if it has wrap-around
dials, which would make it practically useless to him. This indeed is
a problem, which turned up when hardware synths were facing the
problem of having enough memory to store more than like 127 presets or
to make finer adjustments than this range allows. Just limiting the
possible settings to small numbers isn't really an option nowadays,
but doing something like a click when the wrap-around point is reached
or similar accessibility methods would not only help visually impaired
users.