Guys, first of all BIG thanks for what LMMS has already become. A pleasure
to work with. I really hope that the feedback below will be useful to the
developers.
Starting off with two more serious bugs
1. I've been using LMMS heavily these days. I must say that it hasn't
crashed on me once, which is very great. However, regularly, about every
10-20 minutes the sound would disappear. I can still save my project and in
fact I can even continue to edit it, but there is no sound. If I go to
System Monitor at that moment, I can see that lmms process is in futex_wait.
I close LMMS and then have to kill the lmms process since it is still stuck
there. Then I restart LMMS and it works fine for another 20 minutes. In rare
cases LMMS would go into futex_wait almost immediately after loading.
I am on Ubuntu 9.04 and in audio I use ALSA. I am using a USB external
soundcard and I route the sound from LMMS to it from PulseAudio device
chooser. If I can give more information for this bug report to be useful,
please direct me on what to do (logs or whatever I can look at).
2. Sometimes when I open a project it would say "Untitled" instead of the
name of the project. What happens is that it loads the project and puts an
empty piano roll into the front. The whole project then becomes "Untitled".
If you instantly save the project, it corrects itself. Sometimes there would
also be a similar situation when there would be such a note on the LMMS main
form title: [Piano-Roll - Untitled]. If you open a piano roll with some
instrument instead of replacing this one it would simply add another, say,
[Piano-Roll - marimba2], but the initial [Piano-Roll - Untitled] is left on
the title of the form. All of this is confusing and sometimes gives an
impression that your project is lost and does not load anymore.
Now moving to features, usability and not critical bugs
1. When pasting from one piano roll into another, notes get pasted
incorrectly if the grid is set to a different resolution.
2. Song editor needs to have a definable grid resolution - sometimes (with
me often) you need to place clips more precisely. "No grid" option would
also be good.
3. When you open a project, it marks it as "dirty" even if you do such an
innocent thing as click on a track (pattern) in song editor to highlight it
so that you can look at its properties or load it into the BB editor.
4. (Important!!!) When you clone a track in BB editor, it clones even the
piano roll notes in all the patterns. This is extremely inconvinient as it
doubles the notes and you have to go through all the project and find out
where the doubling occured.
5. Similar problem is with cloning in the Song editor. While I can see
theoretical use of this, in reality deleting all the unnecessary clips from
the song editor each time you clone a track is what you usually have to do.
Cases when you would want to double the clips are very rare. This has been
reported before but it is a usability issue, especially with very long
tunes.
6. Samples can be previewed from the sidebar. It would be nice if they could
be previewed from Open dialog. Also, really great if you do not need to
double click on them to preview, but just select.
7. The SPACE key usage should be rethought, in my opinion. You get used to
it starting and stopping playback, but sometimes you can accidentally do
something else with it, like load a new project if the main window is
activated somehow or some other things which happen to be in focus. I
strongly suggest SPACE key is reserved for playback toggle only.
8. Playback toggle itself is still confusing. When neither BB editor nor
Song Editor are in focus, SPACE key does nothing which is confusing and not
convenient. I am in favour of introducing Patter Mode and Song Mode which
would eliminate any need to switch between windows all the time. SPACE key
toggles the song or a pattern which is selected no matter what is in focus.
I also question the need to play piano roll separately when you are focused
on it. This can easily be achieved by soloing a track. On the other hand,
playing a piano roll with the rest of the pattern at the moment is difficult
to do - you have to switch to the BB Editor window, then press play, then go
back to the piano roll. And when you are recording, I found no way to record
along with the rest of BB Editor or the rest of the song. Even if it is
possible, it is very unobvious.
9. In LMMS all plugin options use numbers instead of words which makes it
difficult to understand what is what. For instance, in Calf Vintage Delay
there are modes like Plain, Tape, Old Tape. In Ardour it is displayed
correctly, in LMMS it is mode 0, 1, 2. This is not easy to work with and
with less known plugins you might even give up guessing what the options
are.
10. When you put FX into FX tab in the instrument window, they do not work
correctly - when you stop pushing the button, effects stop sounding too.
Especially noticable with things like reverb or delay.
11. This has been discussed before, but I want to additionaly highlight it.
Having many windows of instruments open is no problem for me. The problem is
that when no instrument window is in focus, you cannot use your computer
keyboard to play it. In the process of configuring effects I have to switch
between mixer window and instrument window all the time to check for
changes. This is very inconvenient. It can be worked around by tuning
effects while playing the BB editor with this instrument or using a midi
keyboard, but these should be options to the computer keyboard.
Besides, having extensively used LMMS, I still fail to see any special
benefits of being able to open multiple instrument windows. With one window,
however, the benefit would be that LMMS would always know what instrument is
selected and computer keyboard would be able to play this instrument even if
the instrument window is not in focus.
Let's talk about naming
1. BB editor is, in my opinion, an incorrect name since you can edit much
more than beats and basslines there - you can have piano roll too. So the
name is misleading. My suggestion would be Track Editor, Clip Editor or
Pattern Editor, with my personal sympathies going to the latter one, due to
the fact that it is a term which is used in a whole variety of music
software and not only in sequencers, but in trackers too.
2. As it has been pointed out, the name LMMS makes little sense now. I
suggest several variants and ideas below.
First of all, although LMMS is cross platform, in the free software world
its main feature which makes it different from other GNU/Linux audio
applications is that it is an integrated audio workstation - you do not need
to connect dozens of apps to make music, it's all inside. So I think the
name should reflect that.
Second, I believe that even if the name does have GNU/Linux reference in it,
it is still okay even though it is cross platform. Initially LMMS came from
the free software world and if the name reflects it, I think it is cool. Not
being a free software purist, I however think that using the name of an OS
component (Linux instead of GNU/Linux) is a bit weird. Having said all that,
I believe not using neither Linux nor GNU in the name would be a good idea
=)
Third, some of my own options, feel free to laugh:
-Digital Music Studio (boring)
-Integrated Audio Environment (too scientific)
-FL Studio Clone (joke)
-AtoZ Studio (meaning it has everything from A to Z)
-Zebra (just for the fun of it)
-Fresh Tomato Studio (double joke. for those wanting hints think of a
popular movie review site and a DAW mentioned earlier ;) )
-Folk Studio (for you all folks, or meaning made by the people and for the
people, or as in folk music)
-Use a name of a popular composer, like Mozart, although this particular
example stinks (don't use Beethoven either)
-Many-Many Kittens (don't ask me why)
-Camel (yeah, animal theme)
-Zit
-Audiocraft
-Composing Studio
-RIF (Resistance Is Futile, hehe)
-GAS (General/Good/Great Audio Studio)
-MUMS (MUsic Making Studio)
The song editor concept
1. Some time ago I have suggested LMMS take workflow closer to FL Studio and
not have tracks sit in the song editor the same way they do in the BB
editor. However, I have now changed my opinion a bit. I would say it can be
very interesting and flexible functionality since one can use it either this
way or that way without it being in the way of any other. In fact, sometimes
you would want to combine two ways of doing things.
Louigi Verona.
http://www.louigiverona.ru
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