Are there any control updates planned?

General feedback, questions and feature requests.
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Argitoth
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Joined: 06 Dec 2007 15:05
Location: Mesa, AZ
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Are there any control updates planned?

Post by Argitoth »

This might seem like a strange question. What the heck do I mean by "control updates"?

Well, right now, the way that the "controls" are implemented are somewhat primitive and limit synth design and sound design options. The controls I am talking about are the controls found on the patch selector. Currently there is no way to limit the range of assigned controls and the knobs aren't big enough to give inspiring names such as:

Slow---Fast

Death <-> Life

Calm - Heavy

These names don't reflect what parameters are actually being changed. They are creative names that reflect a combination of parameters that one may assign to one control. These long names are impossible to use and on top of that, assigning multiple controls to a single knob is usually not a good idea because you can't limit the ranges. I think professional synth patchers would really be inspired by these features as it lets them create a way for end users to control their patches exactly the way they intended.

Implementing these features would require a bit of thinking and development time (I assume). What are your thoughts, Kasper?
karmafx
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Post by karmafx »

Some interesting points you have...

Making range limitation wouldn't be that difficult, and if that would make it more tweaker friendly, I'm all for it.

Regarding the naming, I can't really think of a good solution. The good thing is that the names appear fine inside the host, regardless of how they appear on the control panel. Maybe I should just limit the names on the control panel so they can't be longer than xx pixels or something.
Argitoth
Posts: 189
Joined: 06 Dec 2007 15:05
Location: Mesa, AZ
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Post by Argitoth »

The only way to be able to make the names longer would be to have bigger knobs. :wink:

What I was thinking actually (and this would require some work) would be to have a user-control PAGE just like U-he Zebra: http://u-he.com/zebra/images/Performance.png

That way you could put in big knobs and big X-Y pads (with ability to choose). However, it is also important to consider that KarmaFX is a commercial product and you're trying to make money. Also, you don't have all the time in the world. More money for you means less time you have to spend on your day job.

I just get the strange feeling that adding support for range-limited controllers won't be much of a selling point unless you are able to "package" the new feature with other features on a next big update. This way you could advertise KarmaFX like this: "KarmaFX 1.5, introducing new user-control page and better support for synth programmers! Range limited modulation, now less CPU usage, many more modules!"

All I'm saying is that maybe you should "save" this feature to be introduced later when you have more to advertise...Just some thoughts. :)
roby
Posts: 3
Joined: 26 Feb 2007 19:36

Re: Are there any control updates planned?

Post by roby »

May I revive this post by including a few things I would like to see.

[1] Right now I have a knob in the control panel controlling the waveform selection of one oscillator. Unfortunately when I move this knob, the control panel displays the value as numeric, 0 being 'saw', 33 'square', and so on. It would be ideal if the control panel display could show not the numeric value but the actual name of what you changed. This would ideal for all menus that are assigned to a knob.

[2] In addition to Argitoth's request for limiting, we could add inverse functions to the knobs. Maybe a way to manage knob assignments would be good. For each knob you can open a little window that shows what that knobs is linked to with two fields for min and max for each parameter. Then not only would one be able to limit by, let's say setting a min value to 32 and a max to 64, but you could reverse it too by setting a min to 63 and a max to 32.

[3] Another update that would really great is to expand the control panel to show more rows of knobs.
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