On 9 Sep 2005 at 18:23, Darcy James Argue wrote: > On 09 Sep 2005, at 5:42 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > No, percentages are *not* the right way to do it. > > Percentages are the *standard* way to do it. . . .
Well, we are talking past each other. I said it's WRONG, you said it's STANDARD. Standards can be wrong, and, in fact, to me many of the UI conventions of sequencers are incredibly ill-conceived and implemented. > . . .All major digital audio > applications use percentages. . . . Well, I don't use even one of those, so THIS IS COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT TO ME AS A FINALE USER. > . . . Moreover, the Kontakt Player users > percentages for pan, which means Finale is not even internally > consistent. I DON'T CARE. I use Finale, not these "major digital audio" programs. User conventions derived from those are not going to be "conventional" to someone who has never used them. As Finale is *not* a sequencer, I see no reason that MakeMusic should use sequencers as its only model, even when implementing sequencing functionality. They should choose the UI that makes the most sense within the context of a music notation program, even if it's not the same as that found in pure sequencers. > > 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. > > That would be a little better, but base 100 is still easier and more > intuitive than base 64. Here's as fre clue: IT'S NOT INTUITIVE OR EASIER FOR ME. I *despise* the word intuitive, because it's never used to mean a UI that is discoverable, but is almost always applied to UI that behaves the same way as other UIs that any particular user is accustomed to. It's intuitive to you because it's like other programs, not because it has any necessary logic to it. Indeed, the logic is EXTREMELY POOR, as it maps onto percentages something that has no relation to parts of a whole. > > Well, don't blame that on Finale -- blame it on the people who > > designed the MIDI spec, since that's the way it works. > > There is no reason to force the user to use the raw MIDI numbers. > Finale can easily convert a percentage to a MIDI controller number. > (This is what the Kontakt Player does.) Percentages are completely illogical, no matter how familiar they may be to you or anyone else who has applications that map pan onto percentages. > > 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. > > You are the only person I have *ever* heard express *any* puzzlement > about what "50% right" or "75% left" means. This is the standard way > of referring to panning locations, both on a physical mixing board > and in professional digital audio applications. Well, here's a free clue: I first thought you meant that 64 would be 50%, 128 would be 100%, 1 would be 1%. That would be perecntage of "rightness" and is completely nonsensical. Another alternative would be to center it on zero, then 32 would be - 50%, 96 would +50%. Yet another would be to have unsigned percentages of right or left, where 0 would be the center. Then you'd have 50% right for 96 and 50% left for 32. Yet another interpretation of that is that 50% right would be 64. My whole point here is that there is no necessary logical reason for choosing one or the other. It's only because a group of programs that *you* know all seem to share one of these interprations, and to me, they are all wrong, because a percentage means that you are representing a part of a whole, and THERE IS NO WHOLE here. That's why pure numbers (or signed numbers with 0 as the center) make much more sense, because they don't refer to some unstated ratio that is counterintuitive to the placement of sound in space. My bet is that there are plenty of people who are Finale users who don't have your experience with sequencers and wouldn't necessarily find percentages easier than raw MIDI pan numbers (which are quite easy to understand, though a bit difficult to determine for a desired placement). That's easily handled with a calculator or in your head if you're good with numbers, whereas the percentages require that you grasp an abstraction a level higher than the one the raw numbers require. It may be easy for you because you're accustomed to using that convention. But there ain't nothin' intuitive about it -- it's just that you're used to it. -- 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
