It's the little things in DP 8

[James Steele]

I just took a quick glance at the DP8 stuff on motu.com and looked through the images for a clue about the piano roll and the grey keyboard guides. Pheeeew! I'm relieved!!

Would have been kind of silly for them to remove the gray bars with the change to the black and white "keys" on the side, wouldn't it?

[Shooshie]

I just took a quick glance at the DP8 stuff on motu.com and looked through the images for a clue about the piano roll and the grey keyboard guides. Pheeeew! I'm relieved!!

Would have been kind of silly for them to remove the gray bars with the change to the black and white "keys" on the side, wouldn't it?

Aw, you know they'd never have done that. MOTU makes this stuff as if they were using it themselves. Logic, on the other hand, is the most ill-named app I've ever known.

Shoosh

[stubbsonic]

I guess I'm just nervous as I'm kind of protective of that MIDI graphic editor window. That is where the magic happens for me and my work-flow. There was one change in the past that was a little rough for me-- so I wouldn't make any assumptions. But yea, it would've been weird to lose those bars.

And Shoosh, couldn't agree more about Logic being mis-named!

On the topic at hand, I look forward to many more good little things in DP8.

[Shooshie]

I guess I'm just nervous as I'm kind of protective of that MIDI graphic editor window. That is where the magic happens for me and my work-flow. There was one change in the past that was a little rough for me-- so I wouldn't make any assumptions. But yea, it would've been weird to lose those bars.

And Shoosh, couldn't agree more about Logic being mis-named!

On the topic at hand, I look forward to many more good little things in DP8.

Me, too. I sincerely hope that since they've finished the big rewrite, they'll start attacking our DP wish lists. Now that the code is entirely Cocoa-ized, it should be much easier to change things, add things, and generally to address requests. Of course… if their programmers are looking for new jobs now, then that may not happen, but surely they keep some guys around for such work.

[Killahurts]

OK.. let's have more little things!

[wheever]

The graphic editor is not what I'd call "crap UI design." When zoomed in you can see the keyboard black and white pitches as shades or grey. Yes, the new version looks much better. thank you MOTU, but throwing the baby out with the bath water was never so apropos.

MLC, my point was that at some version, I don't recall which one, MOTU went with that low contrast shades of grey and slightly greyer "keys" down the left side of the editing window. I don't know about you--we're close in age--but my middle-aged eyes are having more and more trouble differentiating low-contrast objects; as a result, the highest contrast elements on the "keyboard" zoomed in in the editor windows become the note names, so I ended up have to read the notes rather than just scanning and know where I was, as I have done for the last ~25 years.

I also have trouble with the middle grey/light grey stripes down the piano roll. It's very distracting to my eye, especially zoomed out, so I find myself having to zoom in farther than I want to be in order that the piano roll not look like a big undifferentiated mess of horizontal lines.

Clearly, I don't think DP is entirely crap UI design, but the low contrast elements are.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

That's definitely something to consider. Approaching 59, I still have pretty good eyes and don't wear glasses except for fine detail at a distance. My optometrist is always amazed by that. My color perception has also been good, so the grey doesn't bother me either but I can certainly see your point. Hey, anything that's an improvement is fine in my book, but the GUI isn't all that important to me.

[labman]

Amplidood skins have saved my eyes. I will attest to that!

[kgdrum]

That's definitely something to consider. Approaching 59, I still have pretty good eyes and don't wear glasses except for fine detail at a distance. My optometrist is always amazed by that. My color perception has also been good, so the grey doesn't bother me either but I can certainly see your point. Hey, anything that's an improvement is fine in my book, but the GUI isn't all that important to me.

It's the competitive sump water swimming we did as kids,I'm 56 and still no reading glasses . It strengthened the eyes and destroyed our minds! lol
But I need glasses for distance.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I need assistance to look inward.

[wheever]

I've tried to edit a theme so as to fix the items that are too low contrast for me, with varying results. Happens, the one thing I couldn't fix were those very elements we're discussing now in the graphic editing window. I really wanted the piano roll to be white and very light grey--or even just white would have been fine. I never found the right bits to fix. Sigh.

[zed]

Now when you zoom in the pitch layer, you get black and white piano keys instead of grey ones.

Very cool little detail. I like it!

I've tried to edit a theme so as to fix the items that are too low contrast for me, with varying results. Happens, the one thing I couldn't fix were those very elements we're discussing now in the graphic editing window. I really wanted the piano roll to be white and very light grey--or even just white would have been fine. I never found the right bits to fix. Sigh.

This is exactly the thing I was trying to edit a couple of years ago when I was building my own theme--the contrast in the grey bars of the graphic editor window. Unfortunately, it was one of the very few things I was totally stumped by. I never managed to adjust it back to the way it had been in previous versions of DP, and just had to get used to it.

[wheever]

This is exactly the thing I was trying to edit a couple of years ago when I was building my own theme--the contrast in the grey bars of the graphic editor window. Unfortunately, it was one of the very few things I was totally stumped by. I never managed to adjust it back to the way it had been in previous versions of DP, and just had to get used to it.

Zed, this conversation made me get out my brain and dig around in the xml document a bit to figure out what makes those horizontal bars tick.

Bad news: I still don't know, because they appear to be a % of whatever is the background color, and don't appear to be addressed individually in the xml. The good news is that if you set the entire graphic editor background to 255:255:255 (max white) the stripes also lighten. This works well enough for me for now. Also, while digging around, I edited the barlines to be black, so they stand out more from the grid. Very helpful!

(If you want to know which TEXT lines I edited in the xml, let me know. DP is on my other computer and it's shut down right now.)

I also noticed that it looks like DP8 makes the grid go away sooner when you're zooming out, which is really really helpful. I kept finding myself in DP7 at a perfect zoom point for what I wanted to see, but the grid lines were in the way and I'd have to uncheck the grid. (Which creates its own set of incorrect key pressing problems.)

[Shooshie]

Not all the little things are good. One thing that's bugging the heck out of me is that scrolling seems to have been adversely affected by some part of this update. I almost cannot get the Sequence Editor to scroll vertically from track to track. It is sluggish and recalcitrant. That has driven me to distraction. I guess I'll experiment with TrackPad settings to see if I can fix it or make it better.

Then there was Bounce-To-Disk. After a long, laborious process of getting the latest LAME documents in their right places, I was anxious to test it. I selected the tracks (difficult to do: see above) and reached up into the Audio menu and pulled it down to… to… wait a minute… what have they done with Bounce to Disk? I checked the menu a couple of times; no joy. I pulled down the other DP menus… not there. Well, it turns out it was, but it was in the one menu I never thought to look at: the File Menu! Oddly, the first time I used Bounce To Disk (and that was a long time ago) I thought it was odd that it was NOT in the File Menu. It seemed like a "File" kind of thing, so why not put it there, along with duplicating files, exporting, saving, saving-as, opening, and closing?

It's ok now. I know where to find it, and won't have to refer to the manual again (which is how I finally found it, btw). But that, the scrolling thing, the fact that I can't use the consolidated control panel, because it won't float to other spaces when I do, are all parts of a growing list of things that cause me concern in DP. Well, BTD is no longer a concern; File Menu is as good as Audio Menu, and actually makes more sense. It was just a detour until I found it. But Scrolling, Consolidated Control Panel, and the inability to use Andy's themes (of which I'm addicted to at least three), have made this roll-out less of a success to me personally than DP 7.0.

But don't take me wrong. DP8 is a watershed event. This is the beginning of the new age of DP. This is OUR entry into the new age of DAWs and sample library performance, which at long last puts us on a new horse who can go the whole distance without having to resort to all kinds of tricks and leaps. DP8 is a winner, folks. The negative stuff? It'll get worked out. Don't even worry about it. In six months to a year, we'll look back at DP7 the way we did DP 2 after DP3, or Classic Mac OS after OS X. Those were good times, but I've moved on. Long live progress!

Shooshie

[dix]

One little thing I found was, that when I crashed DP a new MOTU-specific crash-report form showed up, that presumably goes straight to MOTU, asking me what I was doing when the crash occurred. …btw, i was looking for a creative workaround for DP8's (apparent?) lack of .dv file support when it crashed.