Wish for a better UI

[SrMouraSilva]

@Blindsmyth

With all of these aida things and the dwarf, mod is clearly marketing this for guitarists.

I don’t remember exactly where, but I remember that the mod team wrote in somewhere that they going to (?thinking to?) to focus on this public. Maybe I misunderstood what the mod team wrote, but I agree with you.

@Blindsmyth

“Doing simple things on mod are incredibly complex, and complex things are incredibly simple”

That’s so true. And IMHO it’s a problem, because a lot of times what the guitarists need are a simple plugin chain.

Recently I was looking some other multieffects, specially new chinese fx, like Valeton, Ampero. What they generally have is a simple chain of effects, generally “a series chain”. Some enables to the user create a parallel chain, for example select one amp simulator on Left Channel and another on Right Channel. The most advanced equipment that I saw¹ enables to define two full independent parallel chains.

¹ not counting Mod equipment.

The flexibility what MOD UI offers doesn’t compare with them. But the physical editor of them works like a charm considering what they do.

So I think that maybe the mod devices could have a physical Light editor for simple chains. A simple mockup:

@Blindsmyth

Only a list of curated plugins can be added to this container in order to maintain compatibility. We make sure all of the plugins can do mono to stereo, or stereo to stereo and the system will have a set of rules that chooses the right version of the plugin accordingly.

Maybe a charm solution for this is including custom lv2 ?attributes? into in and out ports:

• if the input or output is designed to be mono, it must have mod:preferredMono;
• if there is stereo input/output, the input/output ports must have mod:audioLeft / mod:audioRight;
• ports without mod:preferredMono, mod:audioLeft or mod:audioRight will not be used by the editor;
• you can combine mod:preferredMono with mod:audioLeft or mod:audioRight;
• for the plugin be eligible to be shown on the Light editor, it must have an mod:preferredMono output and may have a mod:preferredMono input too;
  • the mod:preferredMono input isn’t required to be compatible with plugins like Click, Metronome, Audio file.
  • the mod:preferredMono output requirement could be relaxed in the future for support recording plugins.

With it, I suppose that we solve the curated plugins list and facilitate the implementation of some operations like plugin replacement, swap, inclusion, parallelization (splitting in and merge in).

For instance, this source of code defines the input and output audio port of the Collision Drive.

CollisionDrive/CollisionDrive.ttl

could be changed to

lv2:port  [
  a lv2:AudioPort ,
    lv2:OutputPort ;
    lv2:index 0 ;
    lv2:symbol "out" ;
    lv2:name "out" ;
    mod:preferredMono;
], [
  a lv2:AudioPort ,
    lv2:InputPort ;
    lv2:index 1 ;
    lv2:symbol "in" ;
    lv2:name "in" ;
    mod:preferredMono;
]

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@spunktsch

This is a long ongoing debate (even before the crash) and has a lot of suggestions.
We have to be realistic here: there is only @falkTX atm for all code related stuff.

Yes, I agree that appears to not possible to this moment an effort on this way by the mod team.

@spunktsch

I also had the idea to have a separate app that would generated the file for a pedalboard ( (its all text based, so would only be a matter of coping it to the device). At least for basic plugins or in case of a fall back scenario.

IMHO, a live editor will works better than an full separate editor that requires that we manually include the created pedalboard. If we don’t use the web ui stuffs, probably a Bluetooth communication would be quickly enough.

We could talk with the PiStomp, MODEP and Zynthian guys to know how they communicate with the MOD Tornado API.

What I can imagine now: call the REST api for the necessary operations:

• get plugins metadata;
• add/remove plugin instance;
• change parameter value of a plugin instance;
• connect/disconnect plugins instances.

I remember that once I talked with @falkTX, and he alerts me that not all are exposed as REST (some things are WebSocket). But I think that the upper points are present on REST api.

The biggest problem is the inclusion of the input and output metadata. Without it we must to infer at some way witch inputs are supposed to be considered mono, left stereo and right.

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@spunktsch

I bought an old iPad mini dedicated for this stuff. Printed a case that snaps onto the dwarf/pedalboard and keep it attached all times.

Cool! Could you share some photos, maybe on the Show Us Your MOD Setup! ?