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Can you let us know which version of eigenD and workbench you are using to do this? The recent 2.0.x builds have a keygroup editor to do this, but before 2.0.35 I think you have to edit the keymap by hand.

Hi Randy

We've added a new Keygroup editior in 2.0.36-experimental. No documentation exists for it as yet as it's only been in for a couple of weeks, and we're not certain that it's right yet. There are a couple of enhancements we have planned as well, namely the ability to pull the upstream key geometry in automatically, which will be a timesaver in building larger setups. The existence of the new mapping editor was announced in the release notes for 2.0.36-experimental.

If you select the edit tool in Workbench you will find that you can change the Keygroup mapping by clicking on the 'musical map' port (for course/key mapping) or if you want to play with physical maps (row/column) the 'physical map' port. You will see an 'edit' button, click that and it should be pretty self explanatory from then on in. Please let us know how you get on.

We hope to make a new release this week, one that will include some initial Factory setups. We've been building these for the last couple of weeks and doing so has flushed out quite a number of bugs that we are now hard at work on fixing, hence the minor delay in this release (we hoped to make it last week). The initial Factory setups contain quite a number of differently mapped Keygroups which should give you a nice set of examples to look through. It is no exaggeration to say that the new mapping editor makes it very easy to re-arrange one's keyboard.

As an aside, I do think that saying 'I find myself up against the "WTFM" scenario again' is a bit much. This is the experimental branch of the software and if we are expected to provide documentation (of any form) for features that have literally just been added (and are often not in their final form) then we will simply have to stop doing experimental releases altogether. Al does plan a tutorial on the very subject of building Keygroup mappings and laying out keyboards with them, but there is no point whatsoever in him starting this until the actual functionality is finished. The whole point of the experimental branch is to allow the whole community to participate in this process and help us get the feature right before we fossilise it with documentation. Documenting something increases the 'cost of change' for that feature by at least a factor of two in the future (actually way more if it includes a change to the GUI that means new screen shots must be done) , making 'when to write the docs' a serious decision. It generally costs at least as much, sometimes more, to document a feature as it does to write it in the first place. If you really want documentation (which 'WTFM' seems to aggressively imply - it's not exactly a mild term) for each thing as we add it in then we're either going to have to go at a tenth the speed, abandon experimental releases entirely, or add a tiny fraction of the new features that we currently routinely add. This does not seem like a good set of choices to me. I hope you agree.

John

If that's what you want, then you can get just that by waiting until 2.0.x goes stable. That way all the back and forth about new features will have been done and things will have settled down.
Myself I prefer that eigenlabs continue to release experimental builds with experimental features included even if they are undocumented and part finished. At least they are there to try out.

Well I figured out the key group editor, at least to the extent that I've totally changed the key layout on the Pico and brought the bottom two keys into use for playing notes. But as I only have a Pico I'm not sure what advice I could give about Alpha setups since I don't know what the factory setups are like for that instrument.

Half the frustration for me comes not from documentation issues, but from the difficulty I have in talking about this stuff, my vocabulary is deficient. If I stare at an existing setup in workbench and play around then I can figure things out, but if I try to talk about it in detail using the right terms then I fear part of my brain gets all twisted. The future 2.0 release with more factory setups will be most helpful indeed, although Im not sure if you have much planned on this front for the Pico?

I'm hoping that I may be able to provide something that helps further with communication about all things Eigenharp. Now that I have the OSC thing working I have started work on my plans to do a realtime visualisation of the state of each Pico key. Its early days but already my mind is shooting off in different directions about what use such a thing could be. My original purpose was for entertaining live visuals that go along with what the musician is doing, but I suppose there are educational possibilities, and even the vague possibility that an adaptation of this system could be of use during live internet video chats or video documentation/tutorial creation.

Anyway I'll have something to show on this front before the end of March, although it may not be especially polished by then.

Cheers