Hi guys, With all the refactoring going on, I had to temporarily remove our MIDI learning functionality a couple of weeks ago. With our old implementation, I wasn't entirely convinced that average joe DJ would be able to figure out how to use it, since a bunch of us developers struggled with it. Since I'll need to do some coding to re-enable MIDI learning, now is a good time to have a quick discussion about how people think MIDI learning should work.
Ideas? How do Traktor and Virtual DJ do MIDI learning? In some other MIDI-capable applications that I've used, I've seen the following approaches: 1) If you right-click on a control in the GUI, you can click "MIDI Learn...", move a control on your controller, and you're done. 2) They had something similar to what trunk had before, where you could pick a control name from a giant list and move a knob on your controller. The workflow here was just a pain in the ass (so much clicking and digging through controls to find the right one.) 3) You click "MIDI learn", then you move a control in the UI, and then move a control on your controller, which then magically creates the mapping between the two. #1 might be interesting to look at doing (since our WWidgets know about ControlObjects, I think), but it's still a lot of mousework. #2 was less user friendly and just generally harder to use. #3 reduced the mousework significantly, but it's still a lot of switching back and forth. My own idea that I pitched to people back in the summer (but I guess didn't get any attention) was to have a dialog that mimics the way old computer games used to let you set up your keyboard keys. Some emulators like zsnes work like this too. Basically, the idea is that the dialog will ask you to move some specific knob or slider on your controller, then you do it, and then it automatically flips to the next control that you would need to bind. As an example, the workflow is like: - Dialog asks you "Push the play button for player 1" - You push the left play button on your MIDI controller, - Dialog then asks you (with no user intervention required), "Push the play button for player 2" - You push the right play button on your MIDI controller. - etc. The key idea is that you don't have to touch your mouse or keyboard while you're setting up your controller, and you're being force-fed very straightforward instructions about what to do. So my parting questions are: Is this a reasonable thing to do? Can we make this idea even better? And if we come up with an even better idea, should I just reimplement what we had before and push MIDI Learning 2.0 to 1.6.3? Thanks, Albert ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Mixxx-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mixxx-devel
