Re: [Jsynthlib-devel] Anyone here ever used any other librarian programs?

[Brian <br...@ov...>]

> Has there been any talk about spiffing up the interface? 


I realize this is an old discussion, but I wanted to chime in because 
the JSynthLib Librarian paradigm is 100% my fault.

Before designing the original JSynthLib, I had used many other universal 
librarians including midiquest and sounddiver.
I also researched many others such as Noize and Unisyn to see how they 
handled things. I felt that most universal
librarians shoehorned the user into working in an arbitary way. While 
most Librarians force the user to have only
one type of patch in a library, I felt that the user should be able to 
choose the way they wanted to work. JSynthLib
supports this kind of operation, you can create all your libraries to 
hold only patches for one synth. This is how I usually
work actually, I have one patchlib file for each synth I use that holds 
all the patches for the synth.

Howerver JSynthLib allows you to work this way or to choose to work a 
different way. I felt that only allowing patches
for one type of synth in a library was an arbitary technical limitation. 
With the way JSynthLib works users could, if they so desired
create a library containing all of their piano patches, for example, 
regardless of what synth they belonged to. I figured the actual device
a patch runs on isn't important, users would care about the sounds they 
had at their fingertips and might want to organize them irrespective
to the actual details of how the sound is generated.

I think its really cool to have a library file full of patches for eight 
or nine different synths, and to be able to go down the list and click 
'play'
for each one and have the correct synth play the sound. JSynthLIb 
internally takes care of the 'routing' problems of getting the data file 
to the
correct synth to generate the sound.  From the users point of view you 
don't even care what synth is playing the sound, only the sound itself
. This is nice for trying to find the sound you want.

In addition you can create a library full of all the sounds for a 
particular project rather than having to have a seperate library for 
each synth.
Later on Gerrit introduces 'Scenes' for this purpose so libraries arent' 
necessarily needed for this.

So at least that was the idea behind the design. In practice, most 
likely 99% of the usage of jynthlib libraries are like you described 
with other
librarians. The design may not necessarily be good, but it was actually 
intentional and not just done out of ignorance. :-). The first few versions
of JSynthLib, I was the sole developer, and for a the first few months 
at least, I was the sole user as well. So there are things that maybe no 
one
else would choose but it works they way I wanted a librarian to work for me.

Brian