Re: Possible modifications to interface

Jack O'Quin wrote:
> Hi Patrick,
>
> I have not seen any responses to your message.  So, here are my
> (limited) thoughts...
>
> On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 2:06 AM, Patrick Shirkey
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>   
>> I am revisiting Jamin for the first time in a while and have some
>> thoughts for discussion.
>>
>> 1: What do people think of making jamin into a daemon and splitting the
>> interface code off so that the daemon could be run in the background and
>> the interface could be used only when needed.
>>     
>
> My initial reaction is that a mastering tool like Jamin is mainly a
> hands-on interactive session.  Running it in the background as a
> daemon seems pointless for its primary intended use.  Other uses may
> appear over time, of course.
>
>   

I'm thinking of a studio where the compressor is rack mounted and always on.

I'm also wondering if the lack of activity for jamin is partly to do 
with the interface. It might be that we are giving people too much rope? 
I know we have the presets but maybe we still provide too much room for 
error that is putting people off from using it.


> As a matter of program architecture, I like the idea of separating the
> real-time audio processing from the user interface, which could
> sometimes run on a separate machine.
>
> Changing our existing code base to fit that model would be quite a lot
> of work, I believe.  More than I want to take on right now.  I'd
> consider that a good candidate for a Jamin 2.0 release if someone
> wants to do that some day.
>   

In terms of the gui code it would be about a weeks work to seperate 
everything out. But in terms of  communicating from the gui to the 
server/daemon I'm not sure the best way to acheive that. Maybe using osc 
as it is already in place?


> The existing code seems useful and stable.  I consider that a success.
>  Some day it will need to evolve, but there does not seem to be much
> demand for that at the moment.
>
>   
I agree. But I think this should not stop the dev process.

I'm wondering if maybe Jamin is too powerful for some users to get into? 
I would have thought that by now every single musician would have it in 
their toolset and there would be a thriving community with requests. 
Maybe it needs a few tweaks to the interface that makes it less scary 
for the casual user to get into?

There is a lot of room for providing completely automated setups and 
hiding the interface away from the user to make it appear as a very 
simple application. I think we have an opportunity to make jamin into a 
program that literally gives the user the best result based on the 
knowledge of the developers rather than asking the user to work it out. 
Of course we keep the interface code for people who have the confidence 
to get into it and tweak things behind the scenes.

I guess what I'm suggesting is to add a very simple panel.

It would just have a few sliders and knobs that when tweaked would do 
everything that a user needed and save a lot of time and confusion.
>> 2: With the bypass toggles we could resize the interface to make it
>> smaller if certain parts are not being used. This could be an option in
>> the preferences.
>>     
>
> Probably so.  I don't know the UI code well enough to know what that
> would involve.
>
>   
It's a matter of resizing the panels when switches are toggled. It will 
take a little testing to get it nice and clean but it's not a large 
amount of code.

Going on from there it would be possible to use any one of the panels in 
jamin as a stand alone interface. For example if you want a nice gui for 
a parameteric eq  or just some compressors etc...


Cheers.


-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.




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