New Instrument Dialogue Proposal

• Feb 14, 2014 - 19:35

Some of us are finding that it would be an improvement to have access to the sounds from the Mixer whilst in the Instrument dialogue.

Here is a proposal for how the UI for this might look:-
NOT FOUND: InstrumentDialogue.png

The extra columns in the table could be hidden by default and revealed by dragging or maximising the window.

This is something to think about for the future - perhaps for the next major version.

Let me know what you think.


Comments

In reply to by chen lung

So now the hard part - working out what changes to MuseScore architecture need to take place to implement it.

I did have a try at designing this in Qt's UI Designer, but I don't understand how to resize things without affecting the functionality.

Every time I try to resize the dialogue window it stretches everything else with it.

In reply to by ChurchOrganist

I found it useful to work through the documentation / tutorials I found online to understand how Qt structures things. In general, it's *deliberate* that resizing a dialog stretches things. Which is to say, the MuseScore dialogs are designed to make that happen. So you usually have to "break layout" first (right click, layout / break layout) - and there are layouts within layouts that may all need breaking. Kind of hard to explain, especially since I haven't done it in a while. So I do recommend working through some of the online documentation to get a grasp of how the "layout" stuff works.

In reply to by ChurchOrganist

I don't remember what I looked at specifically, and of course nothing obvious turns up in a search or you wouldn't be asking :-). I want to say it was on the qt web site somewhere, though. Might have been this one:

http://qt-project.org/doc/qtcreator-3.0/creator-writing-program.html

The key concept to understand are the "layout" widgets. These are containers that you place other wdigets in, and they automatically align and space themselves according to the type of layout you've selected. Many dialogs contain layuts within layout, so you have a row of buttons laid out horizontally, say, but that's within a vertical list of options, and then there is an an OK/Cancel button group in another layout, etc.

If we go this route, I would favor removing the mixer window entirely.

One thing not covered in the original proposal is how to handle strings, trumpet, and other instruments that have multiple lines in the mixer (for pizz., arco, mute, etc.)? I actually prefer to adjust the volume of the trumpet as a single instrument rather than adjust the unmuted and muted trumpet sounds separately (as required with the current mixer UI). The current UI can waste space in your mixer window if you have a lot of strings or trumpets and requires more time to make adjustments (since you have to make the same adjustment multiple times). However, if we go to a single line per instrument, we need to make sure that the sound continues to work correctly. For example can we set up the sounds so that they share the same MIDI channel (with patch changes sent as needed) rather than using multiple MIDI channels? If we decide to continue to use separate channels can we make the volume changes apply to all the channels associated with the instrument? Also how would we incorporate igevorse's work on exposing the MIDI channels to the MuseScore UI and JACK.

On a different topic: if you press "Preview" for posts after uploading an image (instead of going straight to "Save") then the images don't display correctly in your post. (It is a long-standing bug in the website software that saves the image files in the wrong location if you press "Preview").

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