[ReZound-users] A few thoughts on the GUI display

[John O. <jo...@mc...>]

Davy,

I've edited another disc with ReZound and I have some minor thoughts on the 
interface. (I am using the v0.9.0beta that Gentoo installs, not anything 
manually checked out of the CVS, since I am trying to keep my working sound 
machine stable. Apologies if any of these things are already attended to.)

Least importantly, those of us who work with multiple versions of the same 
recording at different sampling rates and bit depths, would appreciate having 
the bit depth of the loaded file displayed, as the sampling rate already is,  
just to reassure us that we are working on the version we think we are 
working on. (This feature will become more important as you get older.)

Another feature that I miss from SoundForge (which has its own problems and 
inaccessible developers to boot) is some sort of exact, numerical(?) 
representation of the state of the vertical zoom of the waveform display.  
When switching back and forth among files, trying to compare the details of 
the waveform while zoomed in, it would be great to be able to be sure I have 
the exact same view and that I can reproduce it exactly in the future.  
SoundForge uses a reticle on the y-axis with -inf at the baseline and 0 db at 
the upper and lower limits, to begin with.  Expanding the scale pops up new 
intermediate values.  I have on occasion used that scale to eyeball how much 
to "normalize" a replacement sample, but that is not too accurate, needless 
to say. A simple percentage value (as you already have on the horizontal 
zoom) would at least let me repeat an adjustment exactly.

I saved the nasty one to program till last. I really miss the time display 
reticle from SoundForge on the ruler across the top of the display. I use it 
primarily to double check my judgment about inter-track spacing. (What sounds 
right had better fall between 4 and 9 seconds, or I will regret it later. And 
all the tracks on a single CD need to be within a still tighter range.) The 
problem with the current reticle is that I have to subtract 00:05.983 from 
00:07.479, to get 1.496s spacing between tick marks, then count the tick 
marks and multiply that number by 1.496s to get the timing. And that is any 
easy one, since you can round to 1.5. I realize that you can have ReZound do 
the calculation by simply selecting the gap. But that means that you have to 
unset whatever is currently selected, which may not be desireable. For the 
reticle, I realize that you are at the mercy of Fox, about which I know 
nothing. It sure would be great if it could be adjusted so the tick mark 
values end with some zeros. 

An alternate approach, which would be quite valuable regardless of the 
reticle, would be some sort of buffer to which you could save named 
selections. Then you could restore exact selections from a list. Perhaps it 
could work like the clipboard. Each selection could be named by its start and 
end times. What happens when a deletion occurs earlier in the file? Or 
perhaps there is a way to have multiple, simultaneous selections: aqua, 
chartreuse, puce? Then there could be a mechanism for shifting the focus to a 
given selection, making it the 'active selection.' 

Well, I think I have worn out my welcome for today.

Keep up the great work despite all the suggestions.

John