Our current Studio menu has two options for fiddling with MIDI devices: Manage MIDI Devices, and Manage MIDI Banks and Programs. There's also the newer Manage Control Parameters option, which deals with things that by general consensus probably ought to be properties of MIDI devices but that are instead currently global to the Studio.
I'm currently considering whether it's worth tying these together into a single MIDI device management dialog, from which the other dialogs flow (and making controller settings per-device at the same time). Mostly this wouldn't be hard to do. Here's a proposal: http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/rosegarden/tmp/devices.png The code is just deviceeditor.cpp ripped up and glued together again. The buttons on the right don't yet work (except the ones that already did). This dialog would be the only one of the three to be available on a main menu. The Bank dialog would be available from the Banks button on this one (configuring banks for only the selected device) and the Controllers dialog from the Controllers button (configuring controllers for only the selected device likewise). Import and Export would be as for the options on the Bank dialog, but would import everything about a device, not just banks. Possibly we might want to keep Import/Export on the bank dialog as well. The main advantage to this is it's easier to do simple setup of everything in your studio from existing library files: just select a device, check the connection, and hit import. The more I try to use (and particularly to demo) this software, the more I realise that having to use two separate dialogs to set up your connections and patches is quite a serious overhead. I notice that MusE's (IMHO mostly opaque) port management dialog has a simple dropdown to choose from the set of predefined device types (GM, GS, Yamaha whatnot) for each port... whilst I like the fact that our method makes it clear that you can create and export your own devices as well, I do find the simplicity of that appealing. Accordingly I've also coded this so that a double-click on the device name opens the import dialog directly. Note that we could also bring the configuration of the current record device into this dialog (as shown). The main _dis_advantage I think is the relative lack of feedback for some of these operations. If you hit Import and select a file, you're probably going to overwrite the patches on whichever device you had selected in the dialog, but you won't get any feedback on that except the change in device name, and you may never have actually deliberately selected a device before you hit the button anyway. Having Import on the bank dialog is more transparent from that point of view. Anyway, just a suggestion and to open discussion. I'm prepared to implement this (including the controller stuff) forthwith if it's taken to be a good idea. The vast majority of the remaining work is just cut-&-paste: bringing things like the Import code from the bank dialog into this dialog or somewhere common, and so on. The controllers would need a bit of care, but there are quite a few bug fixes needed there already so I could combine the two. I won't be committing this prototype unless I'm actually going ahead with it -- it wouldn't tell you anything much besides what you can see already. Chris ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SF.net Giveback Program. Does SourceForge.net help you be more productive? Does it help you create better code? SHARE THE LOVE, and help us help YOU! Click Here: http://sourceforge.net/donate/ _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
