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Just an observation / wishlist item

- it would be nice if stage widgets could store and be able to snap back to the value that is in the setup. (it would also be nice to be able to display this value)

- value ranges: are a bit wonky. For example the "pitch time input" starts at 0 but the next value is 1000... not very useful for setting portamento time. In general, it would be nice to be able to change the range and step value of widgets.

- setting display: It would be nice to have 'landmarks' along with the current setting. I'm thinking of something like little lines across the display to show not just the default value but also the one in the loaded setup as well as things like the highest and lowest used in the present session

- attaching widgets to controls (keyboard and other). This may already be there or previously mentioned (or part of the forthcoming setup platform) but it would be nice to be able to connect widgets to things like external (MIDI or other) controllers as well as to things like pitch and yaw and have the widget display the input as it changes.

Just some early thoughts
m

Thanks for the comments!

We're working on features for the widget parameters, including features that will allow you to set the steps/resolution and ranges for the widgets. These will go into one of the upcoming releases.

Arran

In the future, will stage be able to display the status like selected instrument, scale, tonic, recorder?
It would also be interesting to display an image e.g. based on the selected scale. With this one could get help with fingering.

These improvements may be very helpful to a beginner.

Hi Mike

Thanks for the comments. There are a bunch of layout aids that we have an ambition to implement (I think some kind of 'snap to grid' is probably next) and yours will definitely be on the list. We're probably not going to add any now though, before we put 1.3 into Testing, they'll have to wait for another series.

I'm not sure whats happening with the speed issue you're having, its not something we've seen here. The controls are traveling over the network (using OSC over UDP) and if your network is very busy (especially if you're running Stage on another machine and over wireless) you might experience some lag, which will be visible as the crosshatched area on a control appearing to show you the difference between the value you've set and what it's reached. But on your local machine its usually really hard to get this to appear, if you're seeing a lot of it that sounds like a bug, unless you're doing a massive file copy or something else that is maxing out your network.

Stage does take a little while to start up, with the 'spinning pizza of death' being the only thing you see while it does so - its actually fetching lots of system information from EigenD while this spins and we're about to add a progress bar to show this rather than the alarming pizza. But it doesn't sound like what you are talking about. Could you possibly describe the lag in more detail?

John

As a full time musician / composer, this are my insight's of STAGE
- love the toolbar ala Cubase (ups...long time Steinberg user)
- the 1.3.8 step value
- love just pointing to a knob with Apple's magic mouse and slide up or down for the value. The same is true with Apple's magic trackpad, here you even can slide left to right and up and down for value ( my me to me Christmas gift, ehehh)

Spend this last days with my PICO and if one edit a tab from the Standard PICO setup (add or change it) and then export that tab, when importing it into other setup's every widget get's duplicated.
This dosen't happend if one create a tab from scratch.

I have bin writhing down this small list for some time ( and by now Mike touch in some key points, and John replied to them )

- Undo/Redo
- Copy and paste widgets
- group / un group widgets together
- some way to get a widget resize / fixed size
- Configurable Grid and or snap to grid 

I do also find STAGE a wonderful addition to every Eigenharp, as it is right now and even more when the IOS support gets in action.

In my "spare ALPHA time" I'm creating ( and will post here )the missing PICO Sampler 2 and 3 and others. (it's not that easy and quick done...

keyman

keyman, thanks for your STAGE tab, which works very well.

Recently tried the same with different approach: editing the XML in exported tab-file (.els), replicating Sampler 1 Layout as Samplers 2-4, afterwards adjusting the belcanto-names. Did as well assign some step values.

My new stage tab setup contains ALL tabs, so you would first export your tabs for backup, then remove all current tabs (add an empty one to be able to remove the last one), and finally import from here:
PICO STAGE 4 Samplers

On Sampler 3 Tab we can now easily detune the piano by -10 cents as it seems currently pitched to high.

STAGE is a lot of fun, just discovered the possibility of playing two or more instruments at the same time with different scales(!), tonic, octave - a world to explore. I didn't see this by going through the belcanto documentation...

TouchOSC works as well, but doesn't reflect actual values.
Here is my current version for an iPhone-Screen, work in progress:
Pico_4.touchosc.zip

stefan

Hi, keyman

thanks for testing my Stage tab file. Unfortunately, I did not see the problem you pointed out before posting it. Just made a corrected version, same filename:
PICO STAGE 4 Samplers
Again first remove all tabs, then import from this file.

I found that there can be a problem with Stage in adding tabs or changing elements and exporting them directly afterwards. Always closing and reopening Stage before exporting Tabs helped. (using EigenD 1.3.8-unstable)

As I understand the connection between Stage and EigenD, Stage can always only refer to objects instantiated in current loaded EigenD Setup. So changing the Setup while Stage is running is not a good idea. This is where I probably got mixed up the elements on my tabs.

I would suggest to store the Stage tabs as Part of the EigenD Setup. Thus remotely connecting to an EigenD Instance would transfer the appropriate tabs rather than having to import them from file. There could be an "save to setup" option. But it is early stages, I know.

Stefan

Hi

The bug that was causing duplicate widgets to appear after exporting and importing tabs has been fixed in 1.3.9-unstable.

Arran

I'm using it with A3... although it is an upgraded setup from older versions.

Hi keyman,

couldn't embark on new explorations yet, ship and wind missing in january...
I do like the OSC commands and their simple path values. If only TouchOSC could receive current control values from EigenD, it would already fit my purposes. So I stopped on that route for now.

Looks like STAGE is the way to go. As I understand, you are about to build tabs for an Alpha Setup.
Are you trying to bridge STAGE and TouchOSC? How is that?

Be aware that tinkering STAGE-xml is kind of a hack. The export/import tabs feature may be intended only to share tabs between setups. After all, my approach was to copy a 'master'-tab, and adjust the path-attributes, just like you would in TouchOSC-Editor:

From Stage Tab Sampler 1:
widget name="Detune" path="/sampler_oscillator_1/detune_input" address="<e97ae72fdb33/sampler_oscil>#2.2"
enabled="true" userEnabled="1" type="rotaryKnob"

altered for new Stage Tab Sampler 2:
widget name="Detune" path="/sampler_oscillator_2/detune_input" address="<e97ae72fdb33/sampler_oscil>#2.2"
enabled="true" userEnabled="1" type="rotaryKnob"

Note that I did leave the address attribute value unchanged. This works so far for the Pico, but could cause problems further ahead. If you add the widget sampler_oscillator_2/detune_input inside STAGE, it gets a different address attribute value (8dc321c6efc1[...]) than for sampler_oscillator_1/detune_input (e97ae72fdb33[...]).

So I guess the proper way would be to build a dictionary with all correspondent path and address values, and to use them in some xml-processing to copy the tabs. Some more miles ahead.

I can see eyebrows raised upon fooling around with configuration files. But isn't the very nature of using instruments to explore all of their aspects? Back in mechanical age i would have opened the case and pulled every string to understand. Maybe electronic devices need an equivalent for that, at least for me. In case of EigenD this could be a large switchboard of belcanto-objects, as in workbench. All with major changes ahead, and not for the public yet, as we know. I could bear learning different versions and concepts though...

Wish you interesting discoveries!
Stefan.