Unit selection screen display

Not sure if this has been addressed/brought up yet, but I was thinking it may be beneficial to have a choice (perhaps under admin?) between the unit selection screen opening and displaying the beginning of the list of available units (as it does currently), and the last window position which was focused on upon selecting a new unit. Does my wording make sense? The issue I’m interested in addressing is not having to scroll back through the entire list of units if I have selected the wrong one by accident.

In typing that ^^^, another idea came up for me: would it be annoying to have the unit order organized by how often the user uses each unit? This function could be toggled on/off, and reset to a default order, even.

Thanks!

As it turns out, I missed the unit categorization/browsing ability in the secondary screen until this morning. Perhaps this alleviates the need to address my second concern as I have stated it. Happy to hear feedback if people think either suggestion would be useful (or not) for their workflow!

I’d love to see the unit selection as a kind of grid so you can navigate a bit like the text entry keyboard - replace the words with nice clear icons and you could have a 6 column unit navigation space that would speed things up a lot!

Perhaps this could be an alternative for users who are used to the units?

2 Likes

I really like that idea, kel. Perhaps there could be multiples choices of display styles, accessible under admin?

+1 for icons instead of names for (stock) units.

I can’t imagine icons or more than 6 options on a page being done without a mega GUI re-design.

Alternately, another thought for faster selection would be (and know this adds a second press) but…

go to add a unit like normal

then…

6 fixed options appear (for the 6 soft keys) for a category screen such as:

Oscillators, Samplers, Envelope, CV Utility, Mixing & FX, Custom

Then:

choose i.e.: Oscillator

Then you could select: SIN, TRI, SAW (and future) units

choose i.e.: Samplers

Then you could select: Sampler Looper, Player, Native, Card, Grains (and future) units

choose i.e.: Envelope

Then you could select: ADSR, Skewed SIN (and future) units

choose i.e.: CV Utility

Then you could select: Offset, Period-o-meter, Stress, Quantizer, S&H, T&H, Envelope Follower (and future) units

choose i.e.: Mixing and FX

Then you could select: Channel Mixer, VCA, Compressor, Delays, EQ3, Filter (and future) units

choose i.e.: Custom

Custom Unit + anything you’ve saved in the chooser folder

I feel it could be pretty fast to “nav and skim” this way vs. remembering what a million icons look like. That’s one reason why I passionately hate the Disting :frowning:

1 Like

Awesome! I suppose this is similar to the menu hierarchy currently implemented in the secondary screen, yea?

Ultimately my thought is that it may be beneficial to have multiple options for UI, though I understand the complications of opening the flood gates on that one. If Brian is partial toward the current iteration of UI, I do think my first suggestion could be considered as a navigation option, and might make things a little quicker.

Also! Haven’t seen anything confirming this yet, so asking here: did unit size get smaller somewhere between 2.4 and 2.8? It does seem like I have to scroll less to get to the end of the unit list.

The only problem I see with this is that as time goes on those 6 categories are probably not going to be enough…

This list of functions from Matttechmodular includes some things that are not relevant, but otherwise gives some idea about the range of possibilities…

Amplifier
Arpeggiator
Attenuator
Audio Interface
Burst Generator
Chord Generator
Chorus
Clock Divider
Clock Multiplier
Comparator
Compressor
Controller
Crossfader
Delay
Distortion
Drum
Effect
Envelope Follower
Envelope Generator
Equalizer
Euclidian Sequencer
Filter
Flanger
Frequency Shifter
Function Generator
Granular
Headphone Output
Inverter
LFO
Logic
Low Pass Gate
Midi Interface
Min / Max
Mixer
Multiple
Mute
Noise
Offset Generator
Oscillator
Oscilloscope / Meter
Panner
Patch Cables
Phaser
Physical Modelling
Pitch Shifter
Power Cables
Pre-Amp
Quantizer
Resonator
Random Gate
Random Voltage
Reverb
Ring Modulator
Sample & Hold
Sampler
Sequencer
Shift Register
Slew Limiter
Step Recorder
Suboctave Generator
Switch
Synth Voice
Track & Hold
Tempo Synced LFO
Trigger Delay
Trigger Sequencer
Trigger / Clock Source
Utility
VCA
Vocoder
Wave Folder
Wave Multiplier
Wavetables

Do all these fit in those six categories?

One thing I was planning on doing is letting the user provide their own unit library specification as a text file. In this text file you would be able to specify:

  • Which units to include or not include in the unit selection screen.
  • The order that units appear in the unit selection screen.
  • The list of keywords associated which each unit for use in the keyword filter.
  • (optional) In case you want to specify a hierarchy, you would define folders here also.

In the future, I may add an option that would let you associate an 32x32(?) grayscale icon png file with each unit for use in place of the text.

The current unit library specification looks something like this:

{

  {name="Custom Unit",path="custom/CustomUnit",keywords="utility, effect, source, custom"},
  {name="Mixer Channel",path="MixerUnit",keywords="mixing, routing"},

  {name="Sample Recorder (Looper)",path="Looper/LooperUnit",keywords="sampling, effect"},
  {name="Sample Player",path="Player/PlayerUnit",keywords="sampling, source"},
  {name="Native Player",path="Player/NativeSpeedPlayerUnit",keywords="sampling, source"},
  {name="Manual Grains",path="Player/ManualGrains",keywords="sampling, source"},
  {name="Card Player",path="File/CardPlayerUnit",keywords="source, sampling"},

  {name="Fixed Delay",path="Delay/DelayUnit",keywords="delay, effect"},
  {name="Clocked Delay",path="Delay/ClockedDelayUnit",keywords="delay, effect"},
  {name="Variable Delay",path="Delay/VariableDelayUnit",keywords="delay, effect"},
  {name="Pitch Shifting Delay",path="Delay/GrainDelayUnit",keywords="delay, effect"},

  {name="EQ3",path="EQ3Unit",keywords="filter, mixing"},
  {name="Ladder Filter", path="LadderFilterUnit",keywords="filter, pitched"},
  {name="Limiter",path="LimiterUnit",keywords="utility, effect, mixing"},
  {name="Quant- izer",path="QuantizerUnit",keywords="effect"},

  {name="Sine Osc",path="SineOscillatorUnit",keywords="source, pitched, modulate"},
  {name="Aliasing Triangle",path="AliasingTriangleUnit",keywords="source, pitched, modulate"},
  {name="Aliasing Saw",path="AliasingSawUnit",keywords="source, pitched, modulate"},
  {name="White Noise",path="Noise/WhiteNoiseUnit",keywords="source, noise"},
  {name="Pink Noise",path="Noise/PinkNoiseUnit",keywords="source, noise"},

  {name="ADSR",path="ADSRUnit",keywords="modulate, source, utility"},
  {name="Skewed Sine Env",path="SineEnvelopeUnit",keywords="modulate, source, utility"},
  {name="Offset",path="OffsetUnit",keywords="utility"},
  {name="Rectify",path="RectifierUnit",keywords="utility"},
  {name="Fold",path="FoldUnit",keywords="effect"},

  {name="Linear VCA",path="LinearVcaUnit",keywords="modulate, utility"},
  {name="Rational VCA",path="RationalVcaUnit",keywords="modulate, utility"},
  {name="Env- elope Follower",path="EnvelopeFollowerUnit",keywords="modulate, measure"},

  {name="Sample & Hold",path="SampleHoldUnit",keywords="utility, effect, modulate"},
  {name="Track & Hold",path="TrackHoldUnit",keywords="utility, effect, modulate"},

  {name="Tap Tempo",path="TapTempoUnit",keywords="measure, source, timing"},
  {name="Period -o- Meter",path="PeriodMeterUnit",keywords="measure, timing"},

  {name="Stress",path="StressUnit",keywords="debug"},
}
4 Likes

Looking good to me :wink:

1 Like

Just a thought:

Currently, we can add a preset to the chooser menu - but there’s no method to remove it without finagling with a computer.

What if you could remove a “user” chooser preset from the list by:

-acticating the usual “insert a unit here” menu
-scrolling or narrowing the categories filter so the the user unit is in view
-press and hold the appropriate M key below this unit
-press cancel to remove it to the list (and behind the scenes move this preset file to the unit’s preset folder so it’s not lost)

I might be wrong, but I seem to remember this kind of functionality being cited as a candidate for the admin menu, surely this would be simpler as it would be a dedicated menu?