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Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Read on...

I am probably one of the oldest Alpha users, which has it's benefits and drawbacks. I looked in my eigend home and I see that I have 31 versions installed, which means it's been a lot of work sticking with this instrument through all those early versions which had a lot of sharp edges. I've spend days building setups that were just scrapped and had to rebuild them over and over. Lately I have been unmotivated to play because of the barrier to reconfiguring setups easily.

Since the very beginning there has been one showstopper issue with the design of eigend that has frustrated me to no end. It has made it very hard to keep building new setups and detracted from enjoyment of the instrument. This was the design where you needed to use the harp to drive the UI on the computer to build your setups. So frustrating to have to sit at my computer with the harp in hand and try to navigate like this. If I was away from the instrument for awhile, it was daunting to say the least, to motivate to go through this process over and over again. The modern musician needs to master a lot of software and hardware, so intuitiveness and ease of use is important even for the tech savy user.

Almost Lost

I will admit that in the last months I have not played my Alpha even once. I was very close to putting it up for sale. Mostly for the reason that I wasn't sure whether this way of working with configurations would ever change. Hence why it was a showstopper.

Enter latest "Stage"

Luckily I installed the latest eigend 1.3.16 and noticed that stage has preconfigured tabs for the default setup with all the most important controls placed already.

Most importantly, I see these toggle buttons for bringing up all the chooser windows in eigend. This is HUGE for me! Finally I can work with a setup without the awkward step of trying to have the harp in my lap while simple trying to configure my environment.

The feature has arrived just in time to save me. I greatly appreciate the team listening to the early complaints and want to say that I highly approve of this design path.

Best Regards,
Chris

I'm really happy that stage exports the config as XML. Seriously, this is so helpful. I was always a bit disgruntled that the eigend setups were serialized to a binary file which is pretty much impenetrable.

Please, more human readable configurations or exports, so that we can discover, reuse pieces of setups, etc.

Ideally would love to see the actual eigend setups serialized as XML or at least exportable as such, so we can copy sections and create new setups, etc...

This is a huge leap forward though. It's the difference between being productive and being frustrated. Good stuff.