Re: [Linuxsampler-devel] status update for LinuxSampler -- GUI and native format

[Josh G. <jg...@us...>]

On Mon, 2003-03-24 at 15:57, Marek Peteraj wrote:
> 
> My personal feeling is that the GUI itself could be done from scratch
> according to the needs of 2)
> The reason why i'm proposing this is, that a good sampler needs real
> eye-candy too ;) and i would like to do something about it either by
> doing some artwork in blender and gimp and/or by chasing some people on
> deviantart.com or similar. But it's not just pure eye-candy, this adds a
> whole lot of functionality as well, Halion and Mach5 being the best
> examples. The overall design of the GUI is very important and plain QT
> or GTK just isn't enough for it IMO. What i want/need here is to have a
> nice rendered keyboard(which isn't that difficult since it's sufficient
> to render just a few white and black pressed/released keys to build the
> whole keyboard) a few types of knobs(which isn't difficult either except
> for some moog knobs) and an efficient way to display waveforms of
> samples and scroll them without artefacts(power of 2 should do). If you
> look at Native Instruments Kontakt you can see that the GUI is very
> simple in terms of eye-candy but very efficient as well.
> 

I myself can see many nice eye candy widgets being written for GTK or QT
and integrated with other apps. In this sense I don't see it as really
writing the GUI from scratch but more extending existing ones. Its nice
to have things like menus, trees, lists, etc and not have to implement
them all by hand :) I'm looking into using the GnomeCanvas widget for
all waveform displays (ardour uses the GTK+ version of this canvas) as
well as all envelope, LFO and other graph based GUI widgets. This will
allow these other controls to be overlayed ontop of a waveform display
so one can set parameters in relation to the timing of the waveform.
Ideally eye candy and other such controls could be written as plugins in
Swami.

> I would also like to add some thoughts about linuxsamplers native
> format, which linuxsampler should have IMO.
> I was thinking of something like:
> - XML data - descriptions and settings -- bzipped
> - FLAC compressed sample data
> - peakfiles(?)
> - all packed up in tar
> Notice that this would be the first time for a package to be bz2.tar and
> not tar.bz2 :))
> The only problem with FLAC(and other lossless compressions currently) is
> that it doesn't handle floats yet. I'm not sure whether you guys
> considered to use floats as well, probably yes. 
> 

Thats actually not such a bad idea. If linuxsampler becomes truely
modular it might find static patch formats not flexible enough for its
full capacity.

> Marek
>   

Cheers.
	Josh Green