Charming rant about digital recording software UI's

[bagman67]

This piece offers no solutions, but it's dead-on about how impenetrably designed a lot of digital recording tool user interfaces are.

https://theoutline.com/post/2157/why-are-there-so-many-knobs-in-garage-band

Have fun!

 

[stratamania]

I must say that I tend to agree whilst a lot of this Skeuomorphic stuff may look like something else or someone's fantasy idea of an actual piece of kit it often is not as usable as it otherwise might be.

Skeuomorph, is officially now the word of the week  :icon_thumright:

 

[Cagey]

I must say that I tend to agree whilst a lot of this Skeuomorphic stuff may look like something else or someone's fantasy idea of an actual piece of kit it often is not as usable as it otherwise might be.

Skeuomorph, is officially now the word of the week  :icon_thumright:

I agree on both parts.

For what some of this stuff costs, perhaps the designers feel like they have to offer some fanciful artwork to give the impression of substance. If you simply reduced all the various parameters to a few drop-down menus, edit fields and checkboxes, what you'd end up with would not be very impressive at all. Really wouldn't even require a graphics screen in most cases. But, when somebody pays $1,299 for a compressor/limiter plug-in, it had better look like he bought something when he boots it up, rather than a short list of 5-6 parameters with an editable value next to them that looks like it was written in gee-whiz basic for DOS.

 

[stratamania]

gee-whiz basic for DOS

Classic.

 

[Cagey]

Hehe! Yeah. "Hello, world!", spaghetti code, blind jumps into the tiddlywads and all that.

 

[TonyFlyingSquirrel]

I don't mind when some plugins have the same similar visual appearance as their hardware counterpart, but for things like POD Farm, I appreciate the deeper graphic as it displays the signal chain more like you would envision a pedalboard with the same components to be.

My main thing is sound quality, and navigation to facilitate quick edits that will get me back to recording or moving a mix along.