Re: [Om-synth] midi bindings

[Dave Robillard]

On Sun, 2005-16-10 at 01:00 +0200, Dario Aprea wrote:
> Ooops! An accidental Tab + Space made yahoo send my mail while I was
> writing!
> 
> So, making midi bindings currently means:
> 
>   1. creating a node
>   2. connecting to nodes
>   3. setting controller number
>   4. setting min and max values
>   5. setting linear or logarithmic scale
> 
> I'd put midi controller settings next to each controller in the
> controller area. This would be convenient to control other's patches,
> as the controllers were already thought to control the relevant
> parameters of a patch, so you don't have to open, understand nor modify
> it.

I extremely dislike the idea of cluttering up the control windows with
MIDI binding crap, to be honest.

> This would eliminate steps 1, 2 and 4. So making a midi binding would
> be a one or two-click operation: midi-learn while moving the
> controller, optional click for logarithmic scale.
> 
> A further way of making midi bindings could be on the parameter ports
> of the modules. There could be some more items in the right-click menu,
> which now contains only "Disconnect All": "midi learn", "unbind" and
> "midi controller settings" would be enough. It could even become easier
> to change a parameter making a temporary midi binding, instead of
> opening the plugin gui.

Context menu is a much better idea.

Unfortunately, the problem with making MIDI bindings easier isn't on the
GUI side of things; if it was just an issue of adding a widget here or a
menu entry there, it would have been done long ago.

The problem is that setting up MIDI bindings for a specific port is
inconsistent and strange within Om's "everything is a Node" philosophy,
and pollutes the OSC namespace and is just generally more complicated
than I like.  The MIDI control node thing is elegant and consistent from
an architechtural point of view, but crap from a user point of view.

I was thinking of maybe adding a "MIDI Learn" menu option to a ports,
which actually creates a MIDI control node automatically, sets it's
range to the range in the control dialogs, and connects it to the port.
Best of both worlds?

I don't know, it's a hairy issue :/

-DR-