On Saturday 04 Oct 2003 4:30 pm, Richard Bown wrote:
> The big areas where we're spending time is in the
> calculation of chord rulers (as we know)

Yes.  The refresh situation for these is extremely hard to manage, 
which is why it's taking me so long to get right. 

> and also the notation
> quantization when importing MIDI.

That's one I forgot to mention.

While there are certainly things we could probably do quicker about 
the quantization itself, the problem here is not so much with the 
technical details as with the user experience.

A sequencer user opening a MIDI file will expect it to happen almost 
immediately, and would probably prefer this quantization step not to 
happen at all.  (If you go to the Notation -> Quantize page of the 
Settings dialog, you'll see there are various things you can switch 
off to speed it up -- if you have the Tie Notes and Split-and-Tie 
options switched on, you'll find it much slower than the default 
settings -- but there's no option to skip the quantization 
altogether, although it would be easy to implement.)  A notation 
editor user on the other hand will find it extremely irritating to 
have MIDI import sped up a bit at the expense of having a complicated 
procedure to go through before they get decent notation.  (We've had 
puzzled questions about MIDI import on the list before, that would 
have been avoided if we'd made those two even slower quantize options 
enabled by default.)   So the balance is difficult.  The proper thing 
would probably be by default to skip the quantization until the first 
time a notation editing operation happens, but that's not as easy as 
it seems -- there are some operations that rely on notation data but 
that are not so obviously notation operations (such as, *cough*, 
updating the chord name ruler).  Ultimately we should probably head 
that way, but it's not something I've had time to investigate 
properly yet.

> Loading files generally and the
> subsequent calculations we're performing on them just seems
> excessive generally - I wait about five seconds for a file to
> complete loading

Well, we don't do any of that quantization stuff when loading, only 
when importing MIDI.  What's taking the time on file load?

> Sequencer users will expect instantaneous loading, I
> don't know what notation users expect

In my experience notation programs load native files pretty quick, but 
importing MIDI usually has some delays.  Sibelius does the same kind 
of thing that we do -- get most of the way through the progress 
dialog and then hang for a bit -- although it's not as slow overall.


Chris



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