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Come on guys, why do you have to make everything so complicated and difficult to use?
The eigenharp is an amazingly nice piece of hardware, but the software is absolutely not thought for USERS (= musicians)...

I thought I'd be buying the Eigenharp to make music, not to learn a new programing language or manipulate your agents (I don't even understand what those are) or wonder what is going on with EigenD and commander or browser or stage or midi matrix...

I'm sure I'm not alone here! What I dreamt of what was a "plug & play" controller with enough configurability to experiment various things, but not so much that I spend hours on NOT making music.

-I don't need your pianos and clarinets (super innovative instrument... stick a piano as default sound...)
-I have a DAW and VSTs, so I don't need all your integrated stuff.
-I don't want to learn your Belcanto, neither write configuration files.
-I just want an easy, MIDI (or OSC) controller, that I can use to play my VSTs.
-I want easy "behaviour" presets (a bit like your strummer and fingerer thing) that work nicely in MIDI.
-I don't want to open hundreds of windows (commander, browser, stage, main window...) before I can play.
-If I want to configure my PiCO more precisely, I want to do it though a simple, visual widget. (picture of a pico, right clic on keys, assign parameter X, assign light Y, blabla...)

I was so disappointed when I had to spend 3 hours to understand how to configure my Pico before I could play...

I think you need a "user experience designer" or at least someone who could build a bridge between your programmers and your users.

Hi Jean Louis

I think that Geert has expressed the problem with 'Plug&Play' in a MIDI world very well. MIDI is a protocol from the 1980's and is so ill suited to expressive performance that it requires a lot of effort to shoehorn it into any kind of usable solution. Sadly, due to the way it all works, we cannot do all this work for you, all we can do is provide all the things you need to have in order to adapt things to your particular needs. 'All the things you need' is actually a vast possible array of options and there aren't any nice simplifying rules to reduce them to a comfortable minimum, as we have learnt to our cost over the last few years. Every time we try to do that we've had a lot of complaints, and I've come to realise that those complaints are quite legitimate - music is about expression, particularly with the Eigenharps, and tuning the interface between VST's, which use MIDI, and the Eigenharp becomes a basic part of maximising the potential. It's also quite a personal set of choices, choices that affect the way you create, and as such hard if not impossible for us to make nicely simple without dictating to you the way you should play. Dictating to you how you should play the instrument is not what we are about.

In short, MIDI makes is all a bit of a 'dogs breakfast'. VST's are totally MIDI centric, and to coax the best out of them does require quite a lot of effort, effort that is different from VST to VST and from playing style to playing style. There is SO much variation that it's impossible to make it trivial/easy without removing a huge amount of creative potential, and in order to get the best in many situations we have to actually host the VST rather than depend on a DAW to do that for us.

On the 'programming' front you don't need to understand Belcanto to do anything. We've spent a lot of effort over the last couple of years making sure that every possible thing you can do with an Eigenharp is now easy using purely graphical tools. Workbench gives you powerful and complete control over the whole system so that you can makle setups totally customised to your needs and there is a series of tutorials to help you get started with this. Stage gives you real time performance control over these setups, control that can now be used from wireless iOS devices. And we ship, as Geert has pointed out, standard setups that do most basic things right out of the box, including one that just sends plain high rate MIDI out so you can route it to a DAW. If you do want a simple life, this is the setup to use, it just exports the data to your DAW to process as you please there.

I'd lastly just like to say that we are well aware that our UI design has certainly got some rough edges still (particularly the old browser and commander which use a much older and now very dated software library and don't really belong as separate processes any more), but everything built in the last three years has been driven by feedback from the community. The user experience has been created by player feedback and it has turned out that our players want to do an extraordinary amount of customisation as a matter of course. We've tried hard to make this as easy as possible, but sometimes complicated things are just that, complicated, and they take a while to figure out. I'm sorry if you had expectations of being able to immediately use your Eigenharp in a particular way and were disappointed that it took several hours to get that to happen, but outside of the standard Factory setups it's really hard for us to streamline that kind of customisation much further without making profound and limiting creative decisions for the player, and that I'm not prepared to do.

Let us hope that one day OSC might make it all better and that 'Plug&Play' could become a reality.

John

I hate to tell you this David, but advising someone who doesn't like the complexity of EigenD to use Max is like advising someone who doesn't like flying that what they really need is a trip into outer space. I know you like Max but I find it both really confusing and unpleasantly hostile and I know I'm not alone in this. I'm sure that Max is a good tool for certain things and if you have the time and inclination to learn how to use it then I'm sure it can do good things. It still means the overall limitations of MIDI though (no Strummer or Fingerer for you for example, and you're still stuck with velocities on the front of every note), and as I have said before I find the UI pretty unusable.

There are learning curves with all things and I think that it's certainly the case that the learning curve with EigenD is now comfortably easier than Max. You like it because you learnt it years ago and got comfortable with it, but I would seriously advise any newcomers to approach it with caution. It certainly doesn't provide a more user friendly experience than EigenD, in any respect, especially when used with an Eigenharp. Not to say that it can't be used, just that it's certainly not going to give someone an easier time of configuration and tuning. Quite the opposite.

You had a point about Max in the pre Workbench days when detailed configuration was hard and didn't have a nice GUI editor. That's a while back now and no longer makes any sense at all.

John

The OP has a point. It's been brought up before and dismissed just as it has been again.

Creating a highly configurable product has left new (and often long time) users scratching their heads instead of playing music. Ironically, one can probably count on 1 hand the number of active players that are able to grok enough to make significant modifications to or create unique setups. I would venture that most players use the same 1 or 2 setups all the time, because they would rather play music than configure. And instead of addressing the majority of players, more configuration and obscure features (many of those with incomplete documentation) are added.

The notion that one can just load up a factory setup and play through a MIDI device or DAW is not exactly true. One still needs to figure out how to assign EigenD to a MIDI out port -- I believe this still requires Belcanto and Commander in at least some of the factory setups (should be Stage-configurable in all).

The OP should, however, realize that he has the option to do exactly what he wants to do with the Pico and EigenD.

Randy

John - I am not by my harps, but it's either Pico or Tau (or both?) that don't have a widget for setting MIDI out port in Stage.

The 'Talker' agent does not contain complete documentation as of the last I looked. 'Channels' and 'Filters' are not well documented.

Related: you stopped creating Workbench tutorials at a point just before anything really useful or creative. It would be good to double up on those, delving into more interesting and useful setup possibilities.

Randy

We all know the iidiosyncrasies of MIDI and John's "love" for it... maybe that's why there was no STAGE tab for MIDI; but the tools were there and I did create some tabs here http://www.eigenlabs.com/wiki/2.0/Player_created_tabs/
Some how its closed to edit and I never was able to upload my MIDI tab.

Missing Documentation Agents
Controller
Envelope
Latch
Micro manager
Orb
OSC output
Panner
Pan Pipe oscillator
Polyphonic summer
Rig
Sax oscillator
Scale manager
Synth filter

In the end all this frustration is generated just because I feel I have the potentially most expressive controller ever, but being limited because of User Interface complexity.

I understand the complexities of compatibility with MIDI and other software/hardware, and the "plug and play" experience is difficult to achieve.
However I think this is not so much about MIDI (or even OSC) as about the UI. How hard would it be to implement a simple graphical scale editor? Or even better, a note layout editor? Or a simple assignator*? A really simple light controller?
*(I use the custom midi setup, there are 2 keys at the end which are set up as controllers, I guess I have to use Belcanto to change that...)

I understand every EIgenharp users has different needs and wants. Surely you can't make everyone happy. But I guess (I may be wrong here, correct me) that there is a big part of them who just use it as a Midi controller. Then why spend so much time working on features that the majority of your users are not even aware of?

I understand there is a learning curve with every instrument, but this isn't an excuse for poor UI. The gap between the novice user who use the basic setup* and the Workbench/Belcanto expert could be filled.
*I could never get to use the default midi setup, had to install the custom midi setup, which only runs with the 1.4 version of EigenD... but that's another matter.

Hi Jean Louis

All those things you mention, that seem so simple, are in fact complicated and strangely difficult to achieve in a general enough manner to be broadly useful. The issue is one of signal flow - where a light might be connected, or how a key press might affect the note you are playing, is highly dynamic in our world. That dynamic nature of key routing is one of the things that makes the system flexible and powerful. The price we pay for that flexibility is that it's hard to ever tie something like a graphical representation of an instrument to any useful editing function. It would be possible for a completely fixed setup, but a tool that broke as soon as someone used Workbench to modify it would be worse than useless.

We spent a long time about two years ago trying to think of a way to do exactly what you're referring to here and keep the necessary flexibility in the system. By a long time I mean a *lot* of hours, meetings and lot of whiteboard scribbling and brainstorming - it wasn't half an hour over a cup of coffee. All viable solutions we could come up with involve such baroque increases in underlying system complexity (as every signal must then be bidrectional and carry extensive metatdata about what happens to it along route in both directions) that we finally realised that to provide such a nice, easy to use configuration interface was going to make general configuration of the system much, much more complicated, reduce reliability and performance (as complexity always does) and also be very fragile. It would have to be a bit too clever, and that is usually a bad idea.

This kind of configuration tool is not something we're opposed to for religious reasons, it was just too difficult to do properly. Whenever you ask yourself the question 'how hard could it be?' (as I did two years ago) you do have to be prepared for a answer you don't like, and we certainly got one then that we didn't like.


John

Hi all

I just thought I'd share my experience with the eigenharp.
I bought it to help with my composing - to add more expression to my playing of lead instruments, particularly blown instruments. I was a professional software engineer until 3 years ago when I was diagnosed with brain cancer. As a result, I can't expect to perform on stage. Perhaps it could have been made clearer that the Eigenharp is a performance instrument. This has become clear to me since, but I managed to buy it after doing some research without becoming aware of it.

My first two weeks of trying to use the Pico were very frustrating. The cable was faulty, probably due to my trying to follow the directions about wrapping it around the guides at the back. One of the zip files on the USB key was corrupt. And there was a bug in the Cello that caused a repeatable crash. Geert was extremely helpful, but my first impressions were not good.

I now find it fun to play, and by just using the MIDI out configuration and my DAW, I can do what I want with it. The Eigenharp is way more capable than I currently need, but I'm currently happy using the very small subset of its functionality that I understand. I have plenty more to learn in the electronic music world about DAWs, AUs, music etc., so I'm not likely to delve into the Eigenharp world soon. If the GUI was more user friendly, I'd be more inclined to use it for some more complex experimentation. I have NO interest in learning Belcanto. I'm sure I could - I was a professional developer for 15 years. In my opinion, the complex configuration should be less prominent.

One other thing that irritates me is the difficulty of pressing the right note, particularly when I start playing - with my hands floating in the air, it's easy to miss. My eyesight isn't particularly good, so I find it difficult to look at it as I start playing. Has anyone tried to put some sort of guide above the notes to make it easier? (on Pico)

Anyway, I hope that helps,
Bruce

Awesome, thanks Geert ( must have "slipped" somehow but I did mention it couple of times...np)

Just came to my mind there is also good info on http://www.eigenzone.org/
... and STAGE tabs http://wiki.eigenzone.org/wiki/Stage_tabs