Re: [Octal-dev] octal's tracker heritage [was re: text params]

[Dave O'Toole]

"Bullwinkle J. Moose" wrote:
> 
> would be to allow machine to specify the display format (this could be 
> swithed on
> and off from a menue or dialouge box so users who prefer to do so could use 
> the
> straight hex values).  Adding to each machine that wished to take advantage 
> of the
> feature, a pointer named somthing like Display_Value, that would point to 
> sting
> representing how the machine auther feels best, and most acuratly represents 
> the

This is what the ox_desc() function is supposed to do. In Buzz, the
active cell is given feedback in this manner. Octal is to a great extent
imitating Buzz's UI behavior because of the extreme speed with which you
can work. The result is a consistent, compact editing/numbering scheme
that allows editing of different kinds of data (shockingly, without
making the UI an XML parser!) It takes a small amount of time to learn
the correspondence between cell values and the settings, and what you
hear, but this would be the case anyway. 

> user to scroll up and down the available values useing perhapse the < and > 
> keys?
> Then, even with hex values, they would have an idea of what the maximum and

This sounds fine. I'm not sure if buzz allows "in-place" incrementing
but it sounds useful. 

> But probably the best and most usefull thing Octal could do would be to allow 
> the
> user to hear what the values do.  Buzz 1.1 does this when ever a vaule is 
> changed
> in perticular collum, it has the machine generate the tone for that 
> particular set

I think this is only for note values, which makes sense if you tried to
use it on an effect. I think it would be fine to have a button that says
"apply current row of parameters" or whatever. Another button, as in
Buzz, would turn on interactive note-playing from the keyboard. 

> could be played threw while in the patern editor window, so the user could 
> hear
> exactly how that patern sounds, and  make chages right away with out haveing 
> to
> switch around between windows and not have mute (and later un-mute) other 
> paterns

This can be solved by either 1. pattern play or 2. looping the pattern
while you edit it. Buzz didn't have #1, but I would like to. 

> need to have some sort of default tone to run threw them, and/or allow the 
> user to

It's better to just experiment with a sound from your song being run
through an effect. Since nobody will be playing with songs that don't
have any generators (there won't be any sound!) this will be easy to do. 

-- 
@@@ david o'toole
@@@ address@hidden
@@@ www.gnu.org/software/octal