Re: [Jsynthlib-devel] 10th anniversary

[William Z. <wrz...@po...>]

On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Joe Emenaker <jo...@em...> wrote:

>
> 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.
>

That would be cool.


>  - 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.
>

That seems reasonable.  We might preserve secret support for multi-synth
libraries, so JSL can open old files.


>  - 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.


It's up to the user to decide if they want one giant library, or lots of
little ones.  Merging them would make it confusing.


>   - 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?
>

Perhaps "label" and "description".  I agree, I wasn't happy when I
discovered JSL copied my synth's limitations.


>  - 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.
>

I think I have to disagree .. Scenes are meant for live performance.  The
time required to detect this would probably be excessive, but more
importantly we can't bug the user with dialogs in this situation.  We need
to transmit the patches as quickly and cleanly as possible.

-Bill Zwicky