First impressions

Got the app and Pisound-ctl up and running today. Here’s a quick list of first impressions:

  1. I much prefer debian packages than wget scripts piped to the shell. I always have to download them first, read them, then execute them locally - because I’m paranoid!

  2. Upgrade to 1.04 was pretty easy, even for me who had done some customizations of the 1.03 scripts. The backup folder is a very nice touch. The update was easy enough.

  3. I added my “GUI if there is one” script addition to run_pd.sh - I’ll see if I can do a pull request for that.

  4. The test tone patch should really be in stereo. Thought things were busted!

  5. Perhaps there needs to be a way that there can be more descriptive text than just the patch file name. Sure, if it were my patch library, I’d know what they are and how to use 'em. but I wasn’t sure what the sample patches did, or how to use 'em.

  6. The reverb patch needs to be MUCH more dramatic - just so you know it is working!

  7. Should be a way to stop the current patch from the app.

  8. Seems a shame that the nice patch list and patch run machinery used for pisound-ctl is the not the very same machinery used for the button scripts. Like somehow I’d like both systems to search the same set of places, for the same kinds of “patches”, using the same scripts. And the button would launch the first, the app lets you pick. And launching the “patch” would use the same script that can be extended to launch different kinds of things, not just pd patches.

  9. The logic for connecting up Alsa MIDI ports to pd doesn’t seem like it will work for a large collection of patches… Perhaps connections per patch is too much to ask… but then, connecting all MIDI ports into the same single pd port has it’s detractions. I don’t have a good solution here - so perhaps the conneciton logic needs to be a separate script so it is easily overridable. (Since, for a collection of patches you switch via the app, it is probably the case that your MIDI setup is constant?.. perhaps?) (This item applies to both pisound-ctl and the button scripts.)

3 Likes

Wrote that all last night - and forgot to add:

As with all of Pisound - I’m totally impressed with the engineering of this. It installed smoothly, ran smoothly, worked as designed, and peeking at the implementation (I’m a software engineer by trade), it is well architected.

One more idea, building on #7 above: If the button system and the app system used the same “list finding”, - then the perhaps the last patch launched by the app is remembered, and that is the patch re-launched by the button. I’ve used the button when at gigs if things seem to have gotten into a bad state in my patch to quickly relaunch the patch and keep going.

3 Likes

@mzero, thank you for your comprehensive feedback!

  1. I totally do the same. :slight_smile: I think piping a script to sh looks nicer and simpler on a web page, and advanced users can still download the script and see what it does before actually executing it. We are going to be creating more deb packages from now on though, now that we have apt repository set up. :slight_smile: Next pisound-btn update is likely to come as a deb package.

  2. That’s good to know!

  3. That would be great!

  4. Ha! Sorry about that, it will be fixed shortly!

  5. That is a very good suggestion, the next release will likely have something new in that front.

  6. You’re right, we’ll fix that.

  7. Good idea, it will get added. We’ll likely add some additional general OS control too, like a shutdown button. We’re open to more suggestions.

  8. Makes sense, we’ll consider the options of bringing the button and the app logically closer together, as well as making the button ‘re-launch’ the current patch.

  9. Our intention originally was to make all the MIDI connections from the attached gear + built in MIDI ports to Pure Data and back, so that after PD gets launched, a user may immediately get things happening using the attached devices. It’d be really interesting to hear what kind of setup you use and how we could make the design more fitting for you.

Thank you for your kind words! It’s unusual for the tech side of things to get noticed and appreciated. :slight_smile: