Zebralette 3 Spline Editor & UX Discussion

[lattetown]

Again, if someone had some pointers on how software like Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer is made accessible towards visually impaired people, I'd happily pass that on to the team.

While visual design software is very different than sound design software, even Adobe makes their software complaint with EU and US disability laws.

Adobe Usability
...We’ve incorporated hundreds of accessibility capabilities into our tools, like Speech to Text in Premiere Pro, Text to Image generation in Adobe Firefly, and the PDF Accessibility Auto-tag API in Acrobat. These features help increase inclusion so people with disabilities can experience these tools with power, precision, and ease of use.

https://www.adobe.com/trust/accessibility.html

Your team can reach out to the JUCE forum for help with accessibility in audio software.

[Urs]

From a quick glance, these are all not accessibility improvements for visually impaired or blind people. I do not see any pointer to or mention of accessibility functions for visually impaired people in Illustrator or Photoshop.

As I said before, it's a whole different project. It is not going to happen before Zebralette 3 gets released, and probably also not within the next 2-4 years.

We will bring improved keyboard control to our software relatively soon, but we do not at this point of time have any roadmap at all in regards to binding this to the operating system's accessibility functions. We simply do not have the manpower and financial background of companies like Izotope, Adobe or apparently Pace, which owns JUCE.

[jooster]

The manual lists a number of shortcut keys (such as 'G' to cycle through Guide curves). These work as long as the OS/DAW does not capture the keyboard, which is my case. Would it be possible/make sense/acceptable to use MIDI CC for controlling UI functions? That would allow for the use of apps such as TouchOSC on a tablet to program shortcuts. Perhaps this is already foreseen by MIDI 2.0 (I don't know enough about MIDI 2), however, MIDI 2.0 support in DAWs is generally not quite ready yet (?) - this could be available much sooner?

[elfareh]

Probably been mentioned already but just pointing out anything I come across. Black lines in matrix slot 6.

Screenshot (94).png

[tasmaniandevil]

Yep, known and mentioned in the known issues.

[yellowmix]

Can we get a way to automatically create points to match the maximum number of points among curves? So point to point morph can be exact.

[Urs]

There's a concept for this which makes point-to-point exact automatically (kind of) even with an uneven number of points. I have to yet test this though.

[Aamadeus]

Some thoughts on exporting:

I've been creating some nice wavetables with "ExportWav", but I am a bit confused as to how this is meant to be used.

Exporting from other OSC-modes makes no sense, as it just grabs the curve, not the resulting waveform.
But reimporting it as a curve, offers very unusable results.
(It accepts the import of those files per drag and drop, but not with other wavetables or waveforms that I've tried.)

I think it could be left as it is, without the option to reimport those wavs, or completely removed and just have OSC-presets.

(It's still useful, but Zebra3 itself doesn't need it.)

Just an Idea:
If you actually wanted to have wavetable-exports,
wouldn't it be possible/better to make a (standalone) tool, that is basically a single Zebra3 OSC, where all modulation is tied to the Curve-Morph knob.
(The Curve Morph knob is the only modulation source.) Then, when you hit "render" it goes from 0 to 100 on the Morph-Knob, grabs the resulting waveforms and this is how I imagine it would work . (Do all the osc-fx translate to single cycles, though?)

Anyhow, I'm rambling.

Best wishes, Aaron.

[Aamadeus]

Another thing:
Plot domain options are captured for the undo/redo steps (including pre-fx, post-fx, etc.), which I think they shouldn't. It's purely visual.

Best wishes, Aaron.

[nilhartman]

Would it be technically possible to "catch and draw" the resulting raw waveform from Curve Spectrum (as displayed by the Time oscilloscope) to Curve Geometry editing ?
I get the sharpest sounding results with Curve Spectrum, but often I still feel that editing an oscillator's geometry is more intuitive (force of habit I suppose).
Cheers !

[Urs]

So the export function is a feature of the editor, not a feature of the oscillator. It really only ever treats the curve as a wave shape, not a spectrum. Latter happens in the oscillator. We might be able to move the export itself to the oscillator and then it might be possible to use the specific interpretation of the curve as a spectrum. I can't promise anything here, but if it happens it certainly won't happen before something like Zebra 3.1 or so.

The internal representation of the curve is not sample based (I hope that's obvious, as it's the whole point of doing this). Converting a sample to a curve is a bit hit and miss, which I think I mentioned a few times. Some waveforms work well, others don't. Likewise, when exporting a curve to a waveform, any information of what the curve was originally made of is lost (points, segments, morph connections etc.). When importing a wavetable, we have a limited number of curves that that wavetable needs to be reduced to. With no information of the original curve, a re-imported wavetable won't ever be identical to the curve set that was exported.