Love the gadget, not too keen on the editor

[resonotter]

hey, @stratblue Nick,

Midihub Editor Suggestions

This is the sort of editor that would be a game changer for the Midihub. I’d love to use mine more but it’s just a glorified midi merge these days. I open the editor and my heart sinks if I need to do anything more than the most basic of jobs. Using the hub is fantastic, I love what it does but using that editor just isn’t easy or fun.

I wonder how may users share your view ?

I thought a consideration on your points above would sit nicer here than in the more general ‘Editor Suggestions’ thread.


I’ve been thinking about @otzcz suggestions on and off, since they were made then expanded on;

Midihub Editor Suggestions

Hello, anybody here? What about really GRAPHIC UI, instead of tons of text and forms like in 90’s? It’s bit dissapointing to have device full of features and can’t/don’t want to use them bcs of editor is just unfriedly to workflow…did you see or use MIDI-OX, for example? Or CME’s UxMIDI Tools? Or any virtual patch making SW with modules like NI Reaktor? [image] [image] …

your comments:

…a glorified midi merge these days. I open the editor and my heart sinks…

concerned me so…


Using a Giedrius patch as an example

(from here)

Change scenes with footswitch - #14 by Giedrius
with this layout

I made a swipe at trying to depict it as a wire diagram:

I’m not sure if this is what you mean, but IMO is raises a bunch of questions

for example

• would the layout be auto or draggable (with multiple selections)?
• would there be a max num pipes per line?
  (here I’ve scruffily squeezed 14 onto a line, but I’ve seen patches with over 70 pipes in one pipeline).
  And most importantly…
• …while it may give a better sense of flow,
• how much does it aid understanding of what the patch does when one returns to it?

Would a dynamically self-adjusting layout help you patch more intuitively?

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I then went on to think about just creating a summary wire diagram:

or to link to the 'patch' view better:

with a line numbered ‘patch’ view:

the ‘pipeline descriptions’ could be pulled from the Description Panel in a similar way to what I floated here:

Labelled Sections

@Giedrius would the following fit with the house style? As you know, there have been numerous requests for comment fields and Info pipes, with people pointing out that they come back to a patch and can’t remember what they were doing. As a small (and hopefully not really difficult to implement) step in this direction, how about this: Keep the patch structure the same but augment the editor’s parsing of the Description panel, so that it identifies references to (contiguous) blocks of pipeline…

Given @Giedrius’ comment about the Editor…

@Giedrius

There are some technical reasons, mostly involving fitting as much as possible into the memory space available, why the pipes are placed into a fixed grid.

…I dunno whether this could be implemented in a less memory-heavy way.

@steve777’s comment (back in 2020) and the number of people who ‘liked’ it then suggest that some people are happy with the Editor broadly as it is. I wonder how much of a game changer a more graphic layout would be?

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PS. Based my thinking more on your comment, Nick, as @otzcz’s ideas suggest something like this…

…which would mean a different Midihub architecture