On 9 Sep 2005 at 16:16, Darcy James Argue wrote: > On 09 Sep 2005, at 3:54 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > >> And do you actually think that's a *good* idea? > >> > > > > Well, he wasn't addressing whether it was good or not (it obviously > > isn't). He was just showing that your assertion of fact was > > COMPLETELY MISTAKEN. > > Oh fercrissakes. It was deliberate hyperbole. Yes, FInale isn't > literally the only application to handle panning in such a stupid > way. That doesn't make it less stupid. > > Since people don't seem to understand, let me start over. > > With a pan pot on a mixing board, or the balance controller on your > stereo, or any similar device, the default position -- zero -- is the > *center*. The dial usually has some kind of tactile feedback to let > you know that you're centered. All values are defined in terms of > derivation from the center. This is true whether you're dealing in > percentages (as you do in all major digital audio editors) or just > rough approximations like "slight left," "hard right" etc. This is > just the natural way to think about placing something in a stereo > field.
No, percentages are *not* the right way to do it. The sequencer I use (a shitty one that came with my sound card) use MIDI numbers centered on 64 as the center, so it runs from -64 to +64. These seems eminently sensible to me, though I have no trouble with the plain MIDI numbers. > Finale, on the other hand, does not define pan in terms of derivation > from the center. Instead of center = 0, they use center = 64. . . . Well, don't blame that on Finale -- blame it on the people who designed the MIDI spec, since that's the way it works. > . . . 0 is > actually hard right. Now I understand why they are doing that -- > it's how the MIDI controller data is actually sent -- but it is > *incredibly confusing and nonstandard* to think of pan that way. > Regardless of whether someone has any experience with a mixing board > or not, they will naturally think of panning in terms of relationship > to the center, and Finale's way of doing things obscures that > relationship. Instead of thinking "Okay, I want Violin I panned far > left, and Violin II panned far right," someone instead has to think, > "Okay, I need to enter a channel value of 19 for Violin I and 109 for > Violin II." > > That's ridiculously bad UI. Percentages are massively worse, as the percentage would be a signed percentage of, er, um, what? Rightness? 25% right? -33% right? It's transparently nonsensical. Now, simply centering the numbers on 64 and using -64 to +64 is quite sensible. If that's what you'd called for, then I don't think anybody would be up in arms. It also seems to me that you've changed your tune, since now you're saying that mixing boards *don't* use percentages, but use some scale of numbers with 0 as the default centered value. Of course, real mixing boards aren't dealing with MIDI data, so I'm not sure exactly how much that's relevant. In any event, if Finale changes its implementation of how it represents pan values, I would hope that it would offer the alternative of doing it the old way. I doubt they will change it, simply because it would mean handling data for one controller diffeently from the other controllers. Are there any other controllers that ought to be centered on 64 by default? I cna't think of any. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
