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Subject: Replaygain without a setting, and other menu cleaning.

Replaygain without a setting, and other menu cleaning.

From: Paul Louden <paulthenerd_at_gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:04:08 -0500

In the general trend of "streamlining the menu structure" I'd like to
bring up the idea of removing the Replaygain toggle.

I know there was at least one objector in the past. Can anyone see some
obvious actual problems with it?

It seems to me that it's reasonable to assume that if a user puts
replaygain tags on their files, they mean to use them. If a performer
distributes their files with replaygain tags, they're also meant to be
used. At the very least, it seems like an option to default as "On" but
we don't provide a setting to ignore any other tags, the assumption
being "if they're there, they mean what their contents say they mean." I
think it might be reasonable to treat it as encoded audio data, and
always respect it.


Another menu that seems cleanable is the Pitch Screen. I don't know why
this needs a custom screen. To me the most "obvious" improvement would
be to drop the toggle for time stretch (despite RAM cost, this is the
sort of feature that should be always on, with us perhaps reclaiming the
RAM in the future when it's not in use) and reduce it to a menu with two
options - "Pitch" (measured in semitones or possibly something a bit
finer, such as a smaller number of cents or fractional semitones to
preserve the ability to fine tune while keeping the ability to quickly
spot semitones, without needing two menus or custom formatting) and
"Speed" (never changing on its own, unlike now, representing how many
seconds of the file are consumed each second, independently of what
pitch is set at) so that both setting reflect what the user actually
sees or hears, and no complex special screen is needed.


A third problematic screen is obviously the EQ screen. While it's fairly
usable on targets with a pad or stick, on wheel targets the controls are
a little unexpected. I think an "obvious" solution to this screen would
be to make the horizontal bars vertical (with the obvious changes to
controls on pad and stick targets to have up/down change the value, and
left/right switch selected filter, which is more or less the controls on
wheel targets anyway). This would also present a more traditional image
of an EQ to users. With it defaulting to controlling the gain, we could
probably drop the simple EQ altogether, further reducing the number of
menus we expose our users to.


Also, any other settings people think might be droppable? Also, I don't
want to tackle the general menu layout here, but rather custom screens
that can either be made into normal menus, or at the very least, be laid
out so that the physical controls more readily correspond to the visual
presentation.
Received on 2009-06-19

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