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General thoughts about workflow, constructing software etc

Posted

I think, there are two basic ways of thinking in a lot of software programms.
One is, two arrange ways which seem to be useful and to disallow ways which seem to be not.
Advantage could be an easy workflow of often used connections.

The other way is, to allow everything possible, to create an open system, even if some connections don´t seem to be senseful or necessary in the moment.
The advantage is, that things and ways become possible, which maybe later give apparantly very good results in a way nobody thought of.

One example with parameter shift.
Shift is not possible in the moment, as far as I can see, to be saved to figure in any way, also not with a snapshot in a new container.
But if this would be possible, maybe it could solve a problem of mine.
I´m using for basslines sometimes steps, which I apply on music with a lot of chords in it.
Then I use the step of a bassline on that, a baseline is monophon of course, so I apply monophon in the parameter interpretation.
But the problem is, that monophon uses only one note of a chord, if the notes are exactly on the same position, playing mostly the highest note.
This means, that I loose the other notes, their harmonic information as well as the notes itself, therefore needing much longer music pieces for getting the desired length of the bassline.
I tried a lot of things, e.g. "simulate strumming" works, gives me all the tones for the step, but doesn´t work yet for lots of segments at one time.
Another idear is using shift, getting slight movings of the tones, maybe enough to get good results with my monophon steps, but as written it is not yet possible to save to figure the shift values.

So I suggest to allow using simulate strumming also on large group of notes/segments, and to allow saving shift to figure (and by the way also for transpose and probably other parameters). And this would allow some good connections nobody thought of while constracting them.

(In this way I suggest e.g. also the free editing of the length of the preset templates, (this just gave the impulse to me to write this here), exspecially variation, see the item in the feature request forum.

Another thing, allowing save to figure with all parameters, exspecially transposing (we had already consent about that).

But there are of course lots of things like that.)
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SF to me seems to belong by definition to the second way of software, constructed for finding always new ways of connecting musical elements, as easy as possible.

So I suggest to allow the users to set all kinds of things, parameters as freely as possible. This would help to find good and exiting solutions nobody ever thought about before.
Of course its a matter of balance between that and the desired simplicity of the software. A good way could be expert modi in certain areas. But I think, a lot of things can also be done with slight changes, which does not alter the "normal" use of the software.

Greetings
Alfred