From: pondlife <pondlife_at_ntlworld.com>
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:41:36 +0100

> I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. Could you explain a little
> more?

Sure - the only reason that Timestretch can be enabled/disabled is to save
on RAM. This is basically the same reason we allow configurable limits for
"Max entries in file browser", "Max playlist size", plus give options for
"Directory cache" and "Database - Load to RAM". In an ideal world with lots
of RAM you'd happily set the maximum limits and enable all these features.
However we allow users to disable functionality they don't particularly want
and so gain some battery life.


> To be honest, I may have a poor understanding of "nudge" in the first
> place. Could you explain exactly what nudge is for?

OK, say you are monitoring (through headphones) a proposed "new" track which
you want to beatmatch with some other music (i.e. played on another DAP, or
even a CD) which is currently playing to all and sundry. You can use the
pitch shift to get the basic BPM right, or close enough, but you then need
to get the start of a bar lined up so you can mix the new track in smoothly.
By holding the left/right buttons, a temporary +/- 2% pitch shift is
applied, allowing you to "slide" the new track relative to the current one.

I hope that makes some sense, I'm not great at explanations without arm
waving.

> Calculate the corresponding percentage for what, exactly? And why wouldn't
> you need to calculate a percentage with the old system? I can't understand
> what you're trying to do, here, that requires calculations but didn't
> previously.

Say you want to change the pitch of a track to match your piano tuning, but
you want to maintain the exact same BPM. By increasing the pitch by 25%
(i.e. increasing to 125%), you'll also increase the BPM by 25%. To get back
to the original BPM, you'd need to reduce the speed to 80% (100/125 = 0.8).

If you go into the Timestretch mode in the current pitch screen, as you
change the pitch, the speed is automatically recalculated tro maintain the
original BPM - you'll see it displaying Pitch: 125% Speed: 80%.

(OK, I picked a large value to make the maths obvious, but the point holds.)

> I assure you, it's basically the least intuitive screen on the iPod at the
> moment, and it's not something easy to resolve by keymap alone. The screen
> layout just doesn't work for it. But I think if you could explain,
> exactly, what uses you have a menu layout may not be as bad as you think.

I guess the basic problem here is that the pitch screen is fundamentally
based on 2 dimensional input (UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT) but a scrollwheel offers 1
dimensional input (CLOCKWISE/ANTICLOCKWISE).

Perhaps the two axes are the opposite of what you'd expect - i.e. we should
have pitch on the wheel and speed/nudge on buttons?

pondlife
Received on 2009-06-19