Song View IV
Been a while since I've posted, but I've been hard at work on the song view. Keyboard controls are working now - you can use the arrows to move through the list of tracks and move a cursor. Overall I mirrored the piano roll for consistency - the cursor works essentially the same. Spacebar inserts a pattern, you can select/cut/paste using the 'cursor'. The mouse also controls the cursor and allows you to select, add pattern (double click) and remove patterns.
The UI in genome is going to be all about speed and ease of use. Whereas most sequencers rely heavily on the mouse and toolbars packed with different editing modes, genome can be controlled entirely with the keyboard, a combination of keyboard and mouse, or just with the mouse. There are no toolbars required for standard editing. Genome's toolbar is purely for navigation, file i/o, copy/paste, etc.. I find having to switch tools only slows a person down (ie, having to click the 'eraser' if you want to delete something, or the scissors if you want to split a pattern, etc..). A lot of sequencers don't even have keyboard shortcuts for common actions. While keyboard shortcuts should never be relied exclusively (since they are 'hidden' from the user), they are a great help for advanced users who already know the ins and outs of a program and want to get things done faster.
Another thing that really irritates me about today's sequencers (and even a lot of VST's) is that they try to pack too much information on one screen. A lot of musicians seem to think that having 100 knobs, all exactly the same size and color is acceptable, as long as they have access to all the parameters. 'Maximize your space', I've heard people say. What a load of crap. Space is part of the design, and never wasted. A good UI design has a hierarchy of information. More important or commonly used controls should be bigger, set apart or otherwise distinguished. Less common controls can be made smaller or shifted to another logical tab or page. Trying to cram everything on one page does not make things faster or easier - usually the opposite, since people will need to spend more time scanning for what they are looking for. It's okay if the user needs a couple clicks to find something, as long as he has no trouble figuring out where he is going. The layout of the controls on a page should reflect a typical user's workflow - the first items they need to edit should be first on the page, and the sequence should follow left to right, top to bottom, the order that a user would need to go through them. Buttons should be big enough that pressing them (or finding them for that matter) is not tedious. Icons, unless totally self explanatory, need labels! I can't tell you how frustrated I get when I open Cubase, Live or almost any other big-name seqeuencer/workstation software. The learning curve is so high. If the web has taught us anything, it's that it IS possible to write software that is intuitive enough for people to figure out without needing an instruction manual - we just need good design. Unfortunately, a lot of design decisions end up getting made by programmers or people who don't have good UI experience (or who are trying to save themselves some work). Also, a lot of music software tries to immitate the look and feel of music gear, which (though cool looking) is rarely well designed. Try to program a beat on a typical drum machine, I guarantee you can do the same thing 10 times faster on the computer, where you don't have to memorize esoteric combinations of buttons, and aren't limited to a 2 line display. Why try to imitate devices that have had to make UI sacrifices in the name of hardware limitations?
It's also been said that good design involves removing features until you are left with the bare essentials and I'm going to be experimenting with this. Maybe we don't need to see audio waveforms or every note in a pattern, on the song screen. Does that information really help you make a song? Maybe we just need to know what pattern it is or maybe we can just hear what pattern it is. Taking away features like that reduces the visual complexity and should make it easier to find what you are looking for. It's also less intimidating for new users. Keep the UI simple. This is music, not nuclear physics.
May 8th, 2009 - 10:23
Can’t say how much I agree with you here. It seems like every music program I’ve ever used has a major annoyance in the UI. Sometimes it’s because they’re trying to match the aesthetic of hardware, which is ridiculous, because that automatically imposes artificial structural constraints. A good design should take full advantage of the fact that you’re using a computer and not hardware, ie, the ability to abstract away distractions. All these programs that mimic mixer bus architecture are very silly, too. Gawd, the number of headaches I’ve had trying to figure out how a signal is routed in Reason because of all the stupid fake dangly wires. And the same thing with Protools, where I have to write down on a pad of paper what track is on what bus etc. And then you have the anti-piano roll people that think music is supposed to be written in vertical columns of alphanumeric characters. Why??? The main reason people wrote trackers that way was because of computational limitations back in oh, 1992.
I admit that sometimes structural limitations in the UI can give ones music an interesting shape, but the user should be able to decide for his/her self what those limitations are. And what is inspiring to one person (in terms of look & feel) could be totally annoying to another. The UI should give the user his/her own space to be creative.
May 11th, 2009 - 07:15
totally agree.. a lot of music UI designs trade ease of use for ‘cuteness’. I think the main advantages of trackers are not that they look like musical spreadsheets of numbers, but that they are easily controllable with the keyboard and that they offer compact representation of notes and parameters. Also, it is fast to edit. The keyboard makes it easy to enter precise values or notes. Trying to click on the right note can sometimes be tedious where it might only require a few clicks of the keyboard. On the other hand, drawing an envelope can be a lot faster using the mouse, which is why I support both methods.
I’d like to provide an alternative to the piano roll which offers a compact note view (like a tracker), but minus the hexadecimal numbers. This will be another input module – people can pick whatever one they prefer.