Value division when using # of ticks

Question

I noticed that there's some odd calculations going on when 'stepping' a control; for example, when I set the # of ticks to 4 on a control which has a minimum value of 0 and a maximum of 127, the resulting values when moving the control are as follows:

0 - 42 - 84 - 127

Which looks rather strange to me, I would have expected to see:

0 - 32 - 64 - 127

In other words, each step's value should be:

Min value + ((Max value - Min value) / # ticks * step number)

starting from step number=0 and maxing it out to the max value, so in this example the max value would be calculated at 128, but maxed out to 127.

At the moment I have difficulties programming some synths, because the values that the control steps through don't 'hit the mark' for setting the values right. Can you please look into this?

Thanks!

Rainer

Answer 1

Your formula is identical to the one I'm using, more or less. This is a fencepost issue, or due to the way I define ticks. Ticks are "stops" on the way.

What we're talking about here is "gap" size. "Gaps" are the spaces between ticks.

0, 42, 84, 127 is using a gap size of 128/3. There are four ticks and THREE gaps: 0 to 42, 42-84, 84-127.

If I used 0, 32, 64, 127, you can see that the 64 to 127 range doesn't get broken up at all (0 to 64 passes through three stops/ticks, but 64-127 only passes through 2).

So if you want a gap size of 32, you would use a tick size of 5. Then you would get 4 gaps:

0-32, 32-64, 64-96, 96-127

If this "answer" doesn't work for you, I'd be glad to take another round or rounds on this. Please comment on this answer, or email me.

As always, thanks for your suggestions and attention to MIDI Designer. Users like yourself are what makes MIDI Designer so much bigger and better than anything I could've come up with on my own.

Comments

Ah, right, i see what you mean :-) if I limit it to 0 through 96 instead of 0 through 127, I get the result I want. So there's no issue after all!

Thanks!

Answer 2

Your formula is identical to the one I'm using, more or less. This is a fencepost issue, or due to the way I define ticks. Ticks are "stops" on the way.

What we're talking about here is "gap" size. "Gaps" are the spaces between ticks.

0, 42, 84, 127 is using a gap size of 128/3. There are four ticks and THREE gaps: 0 to 42, 42-84, 84-127.

If I used 0, 32, 64, 127, you can see that the 64 to 127 range doesn't get broken up at all (0 to 64 passes through three stops/ticks, but 64-127 only passes through 2).

So if you want a gap size of 32, you would use a tick size of 5. Then you would get 4 gaps:

0-32, 32-64, 64-96, 96-127

If this "answer" doesn't work for you, I'd be glad to take another round or rounds on this. Please comment on this answer, or email me.

As always, thanks for your suggestions and attention to MIDI Designer. Users like yourself are what makes MIDI Designer so much bigger and better than anything I could've come up with on my own.