Observations & requests

Pisound Mobile App
1

Hi all,

I finally converted to the new app scheme. Things are working well, and I like the new UI very much. I have some suggestions/comments/questions:

  1. Is there documentation of the blokas.yml format? I had no difficulty writing mine (which are very simple) based on existing examples, but it would be good to know what is possible and how different YAML contructs are render in the app. Apologies if this is documented somewhere and I missed it, but the Pisound-App web page says very little about this.
  2. It would be nice to have a way to force the app to reload files short of disconnecting/reconnecting, especially while developing the scripts.
  3. The “< Back” links in the app seems to work like the Android back button (i.e., “bring me back to the previous place”), but IMO it would make more sense for it to move back up the screen hierarchy in the app. In other words, when I’m in the screen for a patch, I think “< Back” should bring me back to the list of patches. If I’ve been going back and forth between the patch screen and the Console screen, I don’t find it helpful for “< Back” to just reiterate my movement back and forth – the Active and Console buttons to a fine job of that.
  4. Seem to me that it would be helpful to have a YAML statement that would suppress the “Delete” button when displaying a patch. I haven’t clicked it by accident, but it would be a drag if I did. I think it’s good to have the functionality, but for I think it would be beneficial if the user had the ability to hide it. I haven’t used the new UI in a performance setting yet, but I would hate to hit that button by mistake in the middle of a set.
  5. In the docs, it would be good to make it very clear that scripts are executed by pisound-ctl as the root user. In most cases it probably doesn’t matter (e.g., most of my patches simply run csound against a particular csound script), but I have a particular script that runs csound from a Python wrapper, and the required Python packages were not available because I had installed them at the user level, so they are not available to root. Solved this by using su to run python as the pi user: “su -l pi -c python …”. Nothing wrong with this, but it took a few minutes to understand the issue, so a good thing to document clearly.

But I need to emphasize that this is great stuff, and is a fantastic step forward for headless pisound operation. And it looks very nice!

Oh, and a big THANK YOU to the devs for the recent change that allows pisound-ctl to operate in Raspian 8.0. I certainly will be upgrading to 9 soon, but it’s so much better not to be forced to do so right away. This change is much appreciated.

Thanks for a great system,
Dave

1 Like
2

Hi Dave,

Thank you for your extensive feedback! We will take it into account for future updates.

To reduce the down times after major updates we could integrate support for the customizations you have made where it makes sense for us to do. :slight_smile:

We plan to extend the current documentation on Pisound Documentation with details on this.

The description field uses Markdown to convert the description to html for rendering.

While in list view, you may pull down to refresh. Refreshing the single patch view will be added in next iteration.

There is a confirmation dialog after clicking it to prevent accidental deletes, but we’ll consider the options how to make it safer.

3

Thanks, good info!