Re: [Jsynthlib-devel] 10th anniversary

[Joe E. <jo...@em...>]

On 9/23/2011 6:21 AM, frankster wrote:
> From the docs (which have fallen off the internet in the last couple 
> of days!): "The advantage of a scene is that it contains the locations 
> for the patches in the synth's memories in addition to the patches 
> themselves" So a scene has more to do with a particular synth's setup. 
> It does sound useful - though I have to confess I've only really used 
> libraries so far.

Ah! I thought scenes were something else. Now that I look at the code, 
it is becoming clear to me (and it's also becoming clear that it's coded 
improperly... not just in how the GUI's for them look, but in how 
they're coded on the back-end).

Here are my general thoughts on this:
  - The "Library" frame is a spreadsheet with the patches and comments, 
without any location info. The "Scene" frame is a spreadsheet with the 
patches and the bank/patch location on the target synth. But the 
spreadsheets look too similar. I'd prefer that the "Scene" spreadsheet 
have its rows/columns match the banks/patches on the synth, so we can 
drag/drop them around to arrange the patches however we want.
  - Both the Library and Scene frames allow us to have patches for 
different synths in a single window. This strikes me as more confusing 
than helpful. I'd prefer to have each Library be limited to just one synth.
  - If we were to have Library frames limited to one synth, then I think 
a Library frame should have *all* of the patches for that synth. So, the 
DX7 Library frame would have *all* of the patches for a DX7 that JSL 
knows of, regardless of where they came from. Because of *that*, you 
could make the argument that there's no need to ever have more than one 
Library frame for a synth open at one time. You could have multiple 
*Scenes* open, and you could be dragging patches from the one Library 
window into several different Scenes... but you wouldn't need to have 
multiple Library frames for a single synth.
  - The more I think about it, I think of JSL's relationship to synths 
as similar to iTunes' relationship to iPhone/iPod, in that iTunes holds 
all of your known media, and then some subset of that is synced to your 
iPhone or iPod. So, I'm trying to work out some kind of "sync" paradigm 
for JSL. For starters, since the Library is holding the computer-side 
representation of the patches, it's not limited by the synth's name 
limitations, so I think JSL should let us give long names to the patches 
in the library. When they're placed into a Scene, then their name either 
gets truncated to what the synth's limitation is, or we could maintain a 
LongName and a ShortName... who knows?
  - Going further with the "sync" notion, we could have JSL deal, in a 
smart way, with changed patches it sees from the synth. For example, 
suppose I've got a patch called "Swoopy" in my library, and I send it to 
my synth. Then, I modify the patch on the synth (during a performance, 
say). And then, afterward, I sync a Scene with my synth and JSL would 
notice that there's a patch called "Swoopy" on the synth which doesn't 
match the "Swoopy" in the Library. I could be given a choice of: 1) 
Overwrite the one in the Library, 2) Overwrite the one on the synth, or 
3) Make a new "Swoopy-2" in the library to hold the new one found on the 
synth.

Anyway, those are just some of the ideas I had floating around in my head...

- Joe