LinuxMusicians

Hi devs,

I am quite confused by the information on the MusE web page. People willing to contribute are supposed to contact the mailing lists, but these are more or less dead (there is only spam on the dev list). What is the right way to contact the devs?

I am mainly interested in usability improvements (also, I probably don't have enough expertise for core development). As a HiDPI screen user, there are still quite a lot of issues left.

Some things I would like to improve:
1. Popups parented to the mixer strip have too small fonts (Change track name, Select plugin).
2. The piano in the piano roll looks badly pixelated.
3. Some of the tool cursors are much too small on HiDPI.
4. I miss a mass select of MIDI tracks (to be able to change the soft synth/port). Ctrl+Click each is too cumbersome when you have 30+ tracks.
5. The splash screen is also quite pixelated on HiDPI. A new one would be nice for the next release .

In fact, I have already implemented most of this in my local repo (except 5.). Should I create pull requests for it? What is the general policy?

Cheers,
Kybos

1: What effect does changing the font sizes in Settings > Appearance settings have?
Two of them control mixer strip fonts and therefore child fonts.
Also the first font controls anything not covered by the other fonts.
Read the tooltips over each font.

2: That piano is a hard-coded pixmap embedded right in the code. The graphics have always been that way esp when zooming.
I tried hard to correct that but it's difficult. It's really custom drawn.

4: Yes, was thinking about that the other day. Mass selection of tracks, ie allow to draw a lasso in the track list,
as well as shift-click inclusive selection.

The way to contact these days is any way you can I suppose. I still get ml mail. All spam.
I enjoy the forum because a lot of eyeballs can point things out or contribute to any suggestions made.
But for serious detailed coding discussion and contribution best left out of forums, pull requests are the way to go.
"Present your code and let's talk", sort of thing.

1. Yes, when font1 is changed, it is also inherited by the popups. But then some of the texts in the mixer strip get too big. The popups should use the standard font (font0), thus they should not be dependent on the caller.

2. Actually I was able to achieve a clean piano display (albeit not real-world piano looking, that would be a lot more effort...). I reused the hard-coded pixmaps for the piano, but changed the shapes to strictly rectangular. Then they are scaled correctly. And I replaced the pixmap-C's by a normal Qt font drawing. I would include a screenshot, but I have no idea how to do it here...

4. Lasso + Range select by Shift-Click would be nice, but it's quite a lot of effort and I am not sure if it's really needed. I think it's really relevant only for MIDI/Drum tracks, so e.g. double-click on a midi track could select all midi tracks (the same for drum tracks).

I will try and provide some pull requests, we will see then.

Addition: Screenshots for 2):
https://ibb.co/27JYsZj
https://ibb.co/0nppSR7

Hi Kybos!
(and everybody, I'm still here... sometimes)

The screenshots in the other message didn't carry through to me anyway :/

kybos wrote: 4. Lasso + Range select by Shift-Click would be nice, but it's quite a lot of effort and I am not sure if it's really needed. I think it's really relevant only for MIDI/Drum tracks, so e.g. double-click on a midi track could select all midi tracks (the same for drum tracks).

I would agree that lassoing is probably overkill for non-graphical manipulation. Double-clicking sounds like a nice feature to get all of tracks of one kind selected.
It would also be nice if shift-clicking selected the entire range of tracks from the previous selected to the currently clicked, I've missed that feature.

Looking forward to your fixes and improvements

OK, I corrected the links to the screenshots above, hopefully it works now...

I've provided pull requests for 1, 2 and 4.

2: Phht! Look how wrong I can be...
I like your... 'style'.

Merged all.
Thanks.

Reminds me...
Those ugly 'S' and 'X' letters on the controller views. Been way too long.
Meant to compose some SVG icons for them... But hm, what to show...
I know! A small 'control' knob or something for 'S' and the same with a circle and red line through it for 'X'.

Also the 'all/per note velocity' icon is so indistinguishable from 'off' when 'on'.
I'd like to compose an SVG icon for it.
Keeping in my recent (purposeful) trend of 'unobtrusive soft blue when off, come alive and catch eyeballs when on'.
Again, what can one draw to represent such a detailed thing...

I've been slowly replacing what I can with SVG because pixmaps just weren't cutting it when scaling.
It's a different look for sure. Can't get as much detail out of them. Still the simplicity of them seems pleasing.
I remember looking for a way to do 'no anti-aliasing' setting when drawing them for a crisp 'pixmap' look.