comments/critiques on .4851

[bassntreble]

Well, there's some improvement since the last build. At least it's usable now. There are a bunch of other issues that would prevent Structure from being a serious contender in the softsampler market. A lot of the things seem small and insignificant, but if I'm going to choose where I spend my money, these are the things my colleagues, clients and I look at. Here's a short list of some of the details that should be addressed IMO. I'll preface this by describing my workflow for this session. I just wanted to make a Patch template for a drum/percussion box. Basically around 20 single note zones assigned chromatically from C1, non-pitched. I wan't to be able to plug samples into the template

1- when edit window is smallest (not expanded via dragging) the midi and speaker icons on the right overlap the velocity and ctrl fields as well as the separator immediately to the left of the buttons.

2- when pitchtrack for a part is turned off it doesn't stay off nor is it correctly indicated in the info field at the bottom of the instrument window if there are no samples loaded into a part. Why is this problematic? Read on....

3-There's no way to make keygroups without loading samples. Doesn't seem like a big deal but if you want to make templates for different uses, it's a problem. Every other sampler can do it, even my 20 year old S-950

4-The dialog box for importing samples to a new part is very non-standard for a mac or win user. the pulldown triangle at the right end of the folder field does nothing, it's not resizable and the fields and icons are either redundant or don't make much sense. Lot's of GUI issues as well.
For example:
-Deleting a folder from the sample browser window could be catastrophic in some cases especially with no undo.
-Is it necessary to have "Root Key" as the title for a column that is at the very max 3 characters? 'root' or even 'key' should be sufficient. Ditto for frequency and channels.
-Navigation icons for "next folder" and "previous folder" as well as "up one folder" are very win 95. OSX's (as well as XP's and Vista's) standard browser window GUI's address all of these issues.
-Some fields are left justified, some are right justified. What's with that? How about having the name field left justified and everything else centered?
-there's a weird font kerning issue when '.wav' is dispalyed in the name or kind columns. It looks like a space between 'w' and 'av'

On the upside, everything seems more stable so far. no crashes, snappy operation and the meat and potatoes operations work as expected in the time I've spent with Structuure. Definetly moving in the right direction.