The power of NAMED TICKS

Question

Summary: Expert MIDI Designer layout author fdesnoyers shows some of the power of Named Ticks to reduce the number of controls in a layout. Fascinating!

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Just a quick look at what "named tick" option can represent in building layouts with less controls (when applicable ...).

I modified my DT50 layout by using "named ticks" instead of using Super/Sub controls for some of them. Main goal was: "Hey! it's a rainy day, why not experiment new way of designing my layouts... "

So, what I did was keeping only SUPER controls, changed them to ROTARY format and assigned labels to each "ticks". Note that former SUPER controls are not "super" anymore as there is no SUB controls tied to them...

Result: same power with lot less controls to maintain/modify. No difference at all in "performance mode" but in "design mode", it eases debugging and altering layout since there are less interdependent controls to work with.

Super/Sub controls concept is very useful but this is only to show that sometimes  you can achieve the same goal using different approach.

Layout in Design mode:

BEFORE

I kept Super/Sub method for controls with more than 4 options as it may become hard to remember full option list, hence "Named Tick" may be applicable in certain conditions... but not all.

Note: controls with RED backgrounds are copied controls, meaning that any change made on one will also be applied on its clones. Help identify which controls are autonomous and which are cloned. Great feature!!!

Downloads: 475
DT50 using named ticks
Downloads: 475

Images

DT50 using named ticks

Comments

Great conversation going on here, thanks!

Answer 1

In fact "named ticks" is a great feature! I repeatedly needed ASCII knobs for the sound name characters. I made such a knob once and saved it in a separate layout. Whenever I need it, I open it using "Append to current layout" and then just drag it from its own page to the according page in the layout I am working on. Same is for selection of keys (e.g. from C-4 to G6) - tedious work to do the naming. But once done I use the method described above to copy it to any layout and then simply adjust the connected MIDI message.

I am just having issues with copying text from a spreadsheet recently (it worked before. I´ll post that in the support category.

Comments

I'm also making extensive use of named ticks, finding them really useful. But I have a request. I'm using MD to drive slider values in Lightroom, a photo editing programme. The slider values are floating point so I'm using a shell script to generate floating point text to add to the MD slider but I'm thinking how handy it would be to have MD generate floating point ranges the way it currently does with integers. Just a thought.

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This became a suggestion by kimaldis here: https://mididesigner.com/qa/4622/floating-point-renumbering-of-named-ticks

Answer 2

In fact "named ticks" is a great feature! I repeatedly needed ASCII knobs for the sound name characters. I made such a knob once and saved it in a separate layout. Whenever I need it, I open it using "Append to current layout" and then just drag it from its own page to the according page in the layout I am working on. Same is for selection of keys (e.g. from C-4 to G6) - tedious work to do the naming. But once done I use the method described above to copy it to any layout and then simply adjust the connected MIDI message.

I am just having issues with copying text from a spreadsheet recently (it worked before. I´ll post that in the support category.