Automation Frustration (With Movie File)

I’ve been biting my lip on this one for a few weeks, hoping it would “solve itself” as part of ironing out the beta kinks.

It doesn’t appear that this is on anyone’s radar so I’m posting (too late?)

A movie says a thousand pictures:

http://www.trotch.com/tmp/automation_frustration.m4v

In the aforementioned movie clip, I’m trying to zoom-in the like old Renoise; I want a 1/1 representation of the Automation.

When the clip starts, i’m trying to make it obvious I want to zoom into Pattern 7.

As the movie progresses it takes me 1 minute of clumsiness, instead of the desired 1 second. :(

Suggestions to improve this retardedness:

  • Double-click on the scrollbar currently activates “Full.” I think double-clicking a 2nd time should do a 1/1 zoom, and focus on the selected pattern.
  • Selecting numbers from the dropdown should not reset back to the left, it should instead “move towards” the selected pattern.
  • Dragging the handles on the scrollbar should stagger before going into 1/256 mode.

Thank you for your consideration.

If Zoom Not Full Then Goto Full.
If Zoom Full Then Goto Current Pattern.

I like this.

EDIT: Or double clicking on the Zoom part of the bar, rather than scroll/middle section, could zoom to Current Pattern, double click on centre Zoom Full…

Haven’t yet downloaded B5 and not sure what the “small tweaks” are and if any relate to the Automation but I’ve noticed there is a Lock Zoom To Current in the Context Menu [s]but it is not available to Key Binding.[s] which is available as a Keyboard Shortcut under the name of Snap Zoom To Current (Snap is a lot better word for this action as you’re not Locking anything.)

Actually can somebody explain to me what Lock on Automation does? I don’t quite get it… I would of thought if Zoom Lock is enabled then you can’t Zoom In/Out but the Scroll Wheel would scroll you side to side but this doesn’t happen, you still Zoom In/Out and the only difference if the Quantisation level is updated rather than greyed out.

And please give us the same Sub-Line Snap options as we have for Lock (if you haven’t already done so for B5.)

Great vid. Thanks for making it, explains the problem painfully well. ;)

I’m guessing the reason I never came across this problem is that I tend to zoom with the mouse wheel and zoning in on the current envelope is just a matter of hovering the mouse over the envelope and letting the mouse wheel click forward a few steps.

But for people who don’t use the mouse wheel here, an improvement is definitely needed.

Totally agree on the double-click toggles Full <-> 1/1 feature. We should do that.

As for selecting a new lock level from the drop-down focusing on current, this is a discussion I had with taktik earlier where I felt that if we did this, it would break some other behaviour. Consider the following:

  • Set lock level to 1
  • Scroll to envelope 3 using the scrollbar
  • Click on envelope 3
  • Scroll to envelope 0 using the scrollbar
  • Change lock level to 1/2

Now, I would expect the view to stay on envelope 0 and not to scroll all the way to the right in this situation, just because envelope 3 is the active one. Do we care about this?

EDIT: The “Lock Zoom to Current” in the context menu as mentioned by kazakore of course also does exactly what you’re looking for in one operation.

Well spotted, thanks. Now fixed to say “Lock” also in the keyboard shortcut prefs.

“Lock” here means “lock the display to a set number of envelopes”. So if you set the lock level to 2, it will always lock to 2 full envelopes as you move around even if the envelopes have different lengths. If you disable lock, the zoom level adjustment will become manual, and will always display the same number of envelope points as you scroll around.

Is “lock” confusing terminology here? It seemed a good idea to avoid using “Snap” twice to mean two different things. So the thinking was that you “snap” points but “lock” the zoom.

The idea was that the adaptable grid would sort of take care of this as you zoom in/out. You’d rather have snap options in fractions of an envelope?

EDIT: Changed wording for the context menu option from “Lock Zoom to current” to “Zoom to current”, you’re right, it doesn’t make all that much sense.

Ah I thought Locking it would stop you being able to change Zoom level with the mouse scroll wheel, so it could then be used to move left/right (horizontal scroll doesn’t work with some mice, especially touchpads.)

No that does kind of make sense. Rarely use many different length patterns and hadn’t really noticed the free scrolling, as compared to snapping to pattern start/end of Lock mode. Lock (or possible Fixed (Zoom)) are better than Snap for this.

To make things worse, I was using a trackpad on a laptop, hence the “retardedness” as I have a bit more dexterity with a regular mouse. :)

No, in your scenario I would also expect 0. I think if the “Full ↔ 1/1 feature” is implemented, and the rest is premeditated for other reasons, I can live with it.

Actually we can’t guess what the guy behind the computer wants in all cases, but isn’t it at least more /likely/ that one wants to edit the current one instead of the “leftmost” one?

A deluxe version, which IMHO would do most of the time the right thing, would be something like:

  • when the current pattern !was! visible in the automation, keep it visible while zooming in. preferably center scroll to it, don’t make it the leftmost always.
  • when the current pattern !was not! visible in the automation, keep the left most one the left most when zooming in
  • when zomming out, always do a centered zooming

In conners example, when zooming from full to one pattern, this would only view the current one.
In your example, it would keep envelope 0 visible.

This double click thing is nice, but its not really standard and obvious, so I don’t think this is enough to solve the problem.