The problem as it exists right now: - VST plugins receive control changes as MIDI commands. - this means that each controllable control in a VST plugin takes values in range 0-127 - in LMMS, all controllable controls of a VST are represented as knobs with a range of 0-1, with 0.01 intervals - Effectively, the LMMS knobs are on a scale of 0-100 (they have 100 possible values) - thus, for each control, there are 27 values which can't be used in LMMS automation
What this means is, we can't control VST controls as accurately as they'd allow. One could argue that the 0-1 scale is more intuitive for the user, but then, intuitiveness shouldn't be an excuse to provide inferior functionality (in other words: we shouldn't cripple the features just for the sake of making things easy for novices). So, what do we do? Options: - change the accuracy of the scale so that it has 1000 discrete values instead of 100 - ie. make the step size 0.001 instead of 0.01. This way at least all the values in the 0-127 range can be represented, but it also causes lots of unnecessary values (value bloat?). The upside is that we can keep the intuitive 0-1 scale. - change the knobs to 0-127 scale - this would be a reasonable solution, as the values would correspond 1:1 to the actual values used by the VST plugin, there's only usable values, no extra, none missing... Would be intuitive to people used to working with MIDI. Could cause backwards compat issues, although these could probably be solved with some compat code. - the hybrid approach: keep the 0-1 scale, but set the step size as 100/127, so that there's still the same number of values. The downside is that the step size would be uneven, which might feel a bit weird to the user - but on the other hand, many LADSPA plugins have knobs with "uneven" step sizes, so maybe it's not a huge issue. The advantage: combined benefits - intuitive 0-1 scale, with values corresponding exactly to the actual 0-127 scale. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Want fast and easy access to all the code in your enterprise? Index and search up to 200,000 lines of code with a free copy of Black Duck Code Sight - the same software that powers the world's largest code search on Ohloh, the Black Duck Open Hub! Try it now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bds _______________________________________________ LMMS-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lmms-devel
