When sending a midi CC from external controller it would be cool if Zynthian could briefly display on the screen the assigned parameter name / graphics and indication of the received value. This could be a simple overlay that appears when CC is received and disappears after a few seconds. Kind of similar as you see in the mixer when changing volume, but would be nice to make it larger or configurable. With ADSR controls this could be especially cool as you would the see the graphical representation of the current values.
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This could very quickly become rather cluttered. What to do when simultaneously receiving 2 or 3 or 4 CC??
I actually like that idea. It could just replace the “m” MIDI input indicator with the CC#. In cases multiple CCs coming in the incomimg message just replaces the old one.
This I don’t really understand because the 7 bit CC value cannot really translated into meaningful ADSR values (I mean, is a release value of 127 100ms or 30 s?), and it shouldn’t take much more space than the “m” indicator anyway. That said, I would consider the idea rather a nice to have than essential.
Sort of a midi tester?
It could be an extra page with a square of 128Ă—128 pixels, x-axis is the #CC, y is the CC value. It could even be 16 of these squares, to test all channels.
I wouldn’t want that continuously wiggling on the screen, but for testing purpose to see if a CC comes through, it could actually be useful.
Think about: the more eye candy on screen, the less CPU power for actually making music!
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Rather than built into the infrastructure, it should perhaps be a MIDI lv2 component?
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Or 127 when you touch the pitchbend or modwheel…
I tend to use webconf or jack_midi_dump when I want to test incoming MIDI. I don’t think a plugin necessarily gives the best option because you have to insert into a chain which is at a higher level than you may want to test.
For an operational use, I do see the benefit of letting the use know when something changes (like the mixer) but there may be a tipping point at which this will become annoying.
Maybe a combination of both where you can enable CC display in admin menu which will show all (not just mixer) CC driven controller events in the top bar.
I really don’t like the idea of the gui widgets like envelope appearing without some kind of control. Maybe again a config that allows this. I can see that some users, e.g. using manual CC may benefit from this whilst others with more automation may find it too invasive.
One of the big problems with tally displays is they are by nature a compromise, and if involved in time sensitive events like MIDI control need to be fast and highly responsive.
One only has to look at @riban’s devastating arrival with the PPM display, combined with a complete dynamic breakdown meant there has never been any heavy demands placed on it’s form and it has survived without too much sulking from the CPU meter it replaced.
It would seem sensible to indicate midi events if possible and the M appeared almost as a diagnostic feature and has remain unmolested for some time.
In truth it uses an area of screen that could be better exploited if the colour cue is used to identify MIDI activity.
If you are doing hard and fast MIDI analysis, the MIDI log in webconf is another tool that just does, althou it’s very success might lead to development in the increasingly complicated world of chains.
If it’s not ordering it’s filtering. ..
Most of the coding effort would probably go into the configuration of such an interface, because the range of use cases is a another compliment to MIDI’s effectiveness.
So what can one do in the space of a purply pink M ?
Didn’t someone once raffle the pixels on a webpage…?
I’d just replace the “m” with the CC number.
I’d certainly not use it for any “diagnostic” purposes. My use cases would be rather:
- you use a new or over complicated midi input device you just want to know what that knob is sending right now
- You actually do nothing but the Zynth gets midi messages anyway
The nice thing would be that it would certainly neither produce any calculation overhead nor did it use any more space.
My original thought was not to use the information for diagnostics, but as you said it: I just want to know what the knob is sending. Here’s my idea:
- When learning a new CC, you pick the control to be assigned and twist the knob as usual. After that you’d get a prompt asking “Display CC value on parameter change?" 0/1 → Only if you choose 1, the CC and its value would show somewhere on the screen. This would prevent cluttering as you could control which are those important CCs you would like to see. Ideally you could then position the message anywhere on the screen, change text size etc.
- For example when you send a CC1 assigned to Filter cutoff the display could show this: “(Chain name) CC1 Filter Cutoff (value)”
Barebones implementation could be just replacing the “m” with the CC number + value. Chain + controller name would be nice to have as well (but then it would take a lot of space).
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So it sounds like you didn’t talk about displaying incoming midi cc, but learned midi cc per chain? (Which would mean it doesn’t have anything to do with the “m” indicator) Not so bad actually. One solution what comes to my mind is to expand the rather new chain controller feature.
It might be a nice idea to just append controllers assigned to midi cc to that chained controller list?