Impressions of MU.LAB 2.6.2 on MacOS X

[Orphoneus]

Hello,

a beginner of sorts, I've been looking for an inexpensive DAW and stumbled upon MU.LAB. My first reaction was: "This simplicity is the work of a genius!". While I still share that sentiment, I've found numerous usability issues that give it a very "sluggish" feel, especially for a spoiled MacOS X user, living in the land of milk and usability .

Here a list of issues that, taken together, prevent me from using MU.LAB. I'm on MacOS X 10.4.11 / ppc .

GUI elements
Sliders
The volume sliders in the rack desk always felt weird and very sluggish, and it took me a while to realize what was actually wrong with them: the slider indicator lags behind the mouse pointer! In contrast, the standard behavior is that the indicator is exactly where the mouse pointer is, no lagging behind. (Possible cause: different dpi on Mac / Win screens?) This is quite annoying.

Knobs
While the MU.LAB knobs look nice, they are a pain to use. How do they react to mouse movements? Horizontal? Vertical? Position? They are completely unpredictable; perhaps worsened by a bug similar to the slider issue.

In general, I very much prefer sliders to knobs anyway. They have an immediate and to-the-point feedback that knobs can't achieve and I'm happy to sacrifice screen real estate for that. I think it's no coincidence that GarageBand uses sliders, Apple is famous for doing usability studies.

Rack
What on earth is that tiny blue rectangle for? Moving it up makes some effects cease to work, but why not switch them off the "Process OFF" way?

By the way, I switch processes on and off very often to experiment with different settings. Make it a direct click? Always having to open the context menu tends to be annoying with time.

Menus
Nice idea concerning hierarchical menus, but the native MacOS X menus are still faster to use. See also section 6 of AskTog: A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts.

In general,
The load times for things like showing a rack or the context menu seem to be quite high.

Overall, while reinventing the GUI has some advantages (portability, sound preview for opening files, minimizing windows) but also a lot of disadvantages. GUIs are delicate things and need usability studies. Getting it right is lots of work!


Parts and Sequences
Composition
Setting play marker to the very beginning is very tricky, make some empty room before the first bar?

I don't understand how extending a part to the left is supposed to work.

Sequence view
The bar numbering is weird (-5 ??) and doesn't seem to reflect anything.

What are these "Start", "End", "Loop" things supposed to do??

Editing velocities
is sometimes impossible, mainly when trying to edit some velocities in chords consisting of notes with different velocities. That's because velocity bars are overlapping. I'd suggest to change that in favor of Live / EnergyXT behavior (one click drawing, no dragging with mouse; affects selected notes only).

Please show numeric values, too.

Quantization
There's a bug with quantization settings, they don't take effect immediately. They only do when changing from NoGrind to grid. New setting are saved however, and work when reopening the sesssion.

Misc
Sampla
Sound preview when clicking on the keyboard doesn't apply amplitude settings, I think. Had to change volume constrantly.

No preview for different velocities.

I think the settings for individual samples should be integrated into the keyboard view. Switching between the sampler, starting / stopping a (composition) loop with the space bar and sample settings is quite time consuming.

Tempo Changes
I have imported a midi file with a tempo changes. They got imported into a separate tempo track, I think. They do take effect, but I can't edit them anymore.

Plugins
The linear phase graphical equalizer vst on apulsoft doesn't display its GUI.

Very long parameter lists shoot through the bottom of the screen. Use horizontal space, too; make the window resizable.

Better Mac OS X integration
Applications are distributed as bundle, there should be no folder containing both the program and presets / samples / helper files..

User settings / saves etc go into

Code: Select all

$HOME/Library/Application Support/MULAB

.


Phew, I'm running out of steam. In any case, MU.LAB has great potential, I really like the MUX and the clean reverb. But I think the user interface needs to be ironed out. Eye candy is not important, Reaper may look ugly and clunky on OS X, but it gets the job done much faster than MU.LAB.

[MuTools]

Sliders
The volume sliders in the rack desk always felt weird and very sluggish, and it took me a while to realize what was actually wrong with them: the slider indicator lags behind the mouse pointer! In contrast, the standard behavior is that the indicator is exactly where the mouse pointer is, no lagging behind. (Possible cause: different dpi on Mac / Win screens?) This is quite annoying.

The reason is simple: It's to give you more control over the slider.

If a slider is too small (less than 200 pixels) then MU.LAB will use a region of 200 pixels in which the slider can be controlled.

Isn't that good?

What do others think of this?

Knobs
While the MU.LAB knobs look nice, they are a pain to use. How do they react to mouse movements? Horizontal? Vertical? Position? They are completely unpredictable; perhaps worsened by a bug similar to the slider issue.

You can choose how to use the knobs: Horizontal or vertical.

MU.LAB 'senses' which direction you're using.

Isn't that good?

Ok, if you move up/down and left/right thru each other, the sensing algorithm doesn't know what you want and that may cause confusion.

Do you guys think it would be better to handle knobs vertically only?

In general, I very much prefer sliders to knobs anyway. They have an immediate and to-the-point feedback that knobs can't achieve and I'm happy to sacrifice screen real estate for that. I think it's no coincidence that GarageBand uses sliders, Apple is famous for doing usability studies.

The big advantage of knobs is that they can be tiny, and still very usable. E.g. the send knob in a rack.

Rack
What on earth is that tiny blue rectangle for? Moving it up makes some effects cease to work, but why not switch them off the "Process OFF" way?

It's the Pre/Post Fader switch. Please see http://www.mutools.com/mulab/docs/racks.html for more detailed info.

In a future version, there will be a tooltip for this GUI component.

By the way, I switch processes on and off very often to experiment with different settings. Make it a direct click? Always having to open the context menu tends to be annoying with time.

You can [Alt]+click a plugin to quickly switch it ON/OFF.

Does that help?

Overall, while reinventing the GUI has some advantages (portability, sound preview for opening files, minimizing windows) but also a lot of disadvantages. GUIs are delicate things and need usability studies. Getting it right is lots of work!

I agree.

But it's not a choice anymore.

MUTOOLS software will use its own GUI system now and in the future, especially for multi-platform reasons.

But at the same time i can also tell you that Apple is not very gentle in documenting OSX for developers! Really it's very difficult to find the right info. And once you find it, chance is real it's outdated/incompatible in the next OSX version.

I'm sorry for this critical notes on OSX.

OSX is a very fine OS and i'm glad people have a choice.

It's just that i whish Apple would be more developer friendly.

Using a propriatary GUI system resolves this problem for the greatest part.

NB: I'm not pro windows, i'm not pro osx. I'm especially pro improvement of both of them.

I don't understand how extending a part to the left is supposed to work.

Principle is: The content of the part is kept at its original position.

Sequence view
The bar numbering is weird (-5 ??) and doesn't seem to reflect anything.
What are these "Start", "End", "Loop" things supposed to do??

Last question first: They can be used to loop a section within the sequence.

Now if you have a sequence with 8 bars, and you set a sequence loop from bar 5 to 7, and the sequence is played from 1.1.0000 in the composition, then bars 1 to 6 of the sequence logically come before 1.1.0000 so that's where the min sign comes in.

Hope this clarifies things.

Editing velocities
is sometimes impossible, mainly when trying to edit some velocities in chords consisting of notes with different velocities.
That's because velocity bars are overlapping. I'd suggest to change that in favor of Live / EnergyXT behavior (one click drawing, no dragging with mouse; affects selected notes only).

I've added a note on the whishlist about this.

Please show numeric values, too.

It's on the whishlist.

Quantization
There's a bug with quantization settings, they don't take effect immediately. They only do when changing from NoGrind to grid. New setting are saved however, and work when reopening the sesssion.

I dont see what you mean.

If i change the grid, it has immediate effect i.e. new actions are snapped to the new grid.

Misc
Sampla
Sound preview when clicking on the keyboard doesn't apply amplitude settings, I think. Had to change volume constrantly.
No preview for different velocities.

Although sample preview indeed is very basic (it's a simple preview), playing the previewed samples via the MIDI keyboard is velocity-sensitive.

I think the settings for individual samples should be integrated into the keyboard view.
Switching between the sampler, starting / stopping a (composition) loop with the space bar and sample settings is quite time consuming.

Can you please elaborate on this, eventually using some screenshots/mockups.

Tempo Changes
I have imported a midi file with a tempo changes. They got imported into a separate tempo track, I think. They do take effect, but I can't edit them anymore.

Two ways:

Right-click the tempo -> "Edit Tempo Changes"
Right-click the timebar -> "Edit Tempo Changes"

Plugins
The linear phase graphical equalizer vst on apulsoft doesn't display its GUI.
Very long parameter lists shoot through the bottom of the screen.

Then i assume it's a VST 2.3 plugin (or even older) on a MacIntel.
On MacIntel, only VST 2.4 plugins show their proper GUI.
Essentially that's a decission of Apple/Steinberg.

Use horizontal space, too; make the window resizable.

MU.LAB 3 (which is released later this year) spreads the parameters both horizontally as vertically.

Better Mac OS X integration
Applications are distributed as bundle, there should be no folder containing both the program and presets / samples / helper files..
User settings / saves etc go into

Code: Select all

$HOME/Library/Application Support/MULAB

.

We want MU.LAB to be as platform independent + as portable as possible.

We want MU.LAB to run from a USB stick.

Phew, I'm running out of steam. In any case, MU.LAB has great potential, I really like the MUX and the clean reverb.
But I think the user interface needs to be ironed out.
Eye candy is not important, Reaper may look ugly and clunky on OS X, but it gets the job done much faster than MU.LAB.

Thanks a lot for providing critical feedback. This helps in making MU.LAB better!

Hope to meet you again here on the forum!

[TheGuysanIdiot]

Jo,

As you know I am a Windows user and have no idea how MU.LAB responds in mac, so I will leave that for another mac user to comment on.

IMHO the knobs and sliders track nicely in Windows and indeed knobs are needed when space is short.

I tend to use both knobs and sliders in the vertical up/down. I also use the wheel mouse to change values of both sliders and knobs this is also vertical movement. I personally would not miss the side to side horizontal movement, assuming it causes users confusion. It would be good to hear from others as they may use the horizontal movement.

OZ

[liquidsound]

Vertical: one stone, two Birds.... ( I hope PETA is not reading this...)

[pljones]

OK, I'm weird. I use down and right motions on the knobs... (I've a trackball rather than a mouse and those are the two easiest motions.) I *like* having the two directions.

[robenestobenz]

Sliders
The volume sliders in the rack desk always felt weird and very sluggish, and it took me a while to realize what was actually wrong with them: the slider indicator lags behind the mouse pointer! In contrast, the standard behavior is that the indicator is exactly where the mouse pointer is, no lagging behind. (Possible cause: different dpi on Mac / Win screens?) This is quite annoying.

The reason is simple: It's to give you more control over the slider.

If a slider is too small (less than 200 pixels) then MU.LAB will use a region of 200 pixels in which the slider can be controlled.

Isn't that good?

What do others think of this?

I'm in favour for the moment. You need this kind of fine grain control IMO. Once the fine adjustment mode is available in M3, I think it should track the cursor 1:1 however.

Knobs
While the MU.LAB knobs look nice, they are a pain to use. How do they react to mouse movements? Horizontal? Vertical? Position? They are completely unpredictable; perhaps worsened by a bug similar to the slider issue.

You can choose how to use the knobs: Horizontal or vertical.

MU.LAB 'senses' which direction you're using.

Isn't that good?

I've never had a problem with them, I must admit.

[MuTools]

I'm in favour for the moment. You need this kind of fine grain control IMO. Once the fine adjustment mode is available in M3, I think it should track the cursor 1:1 however.

Yes, i agree on this.

In fact, the fine control is already there now, just hold [Cntrl].

In M3, sliders will always track 1:1.

[TheGuysanIdiot]

Jo,

After reading the comments recently posted on this thread my thoughts now are:

a) M3 track sliders 1:1 - YES.

b) I have been looking at a few DAWs and other VST/VSTi functionality. Although there is not one standard to follow this is my take on it now:

[General]

- Vertical sliders seem to use vertical movement only.
- Horizontal sliders seem to use horizontal movement only.

- Knobs can have vertical and horizontal movement. My favorite synth of all time is Sylenth1 and this uses both vertical and horizontal movement for knobs just like M2.

- Older freeware/shareware VST/VSTi seem to use vertical only for knobs.

There you go.

OZ

[MuTools]

- Knobs can have vertical and horizontal movement. My favorite synth of all time is Sylenth1 and this uses both vertical and horizontal movement for knobs just like M2.

I tried Sylenth1 (wow, sounds nice) and i found its bidirectional knob behaviour better than M2's bidirectional knob behaviour.

M2 senses which direction you use and then uses that direction, while Sylenth simply tracks both directions at the same time, which i find a better behaviour, and is less confusing than M2's sensing algorithm.

So M3 will also do it the Sylenth way.

[TheGuysanIdiot]

Jo,

Yes, Sylenth1 has better hor/vert movement than M2 I was not sure if you could implement that, if you can that would indeed be spot on and yes Sylenth1 has to be one of if not the best software synth out there probably the closest thing to hardware synths.

M3 with Sylenth1 knob control is the way to go.

OZ

[robenestobenz]

I'm in favour for the moment. You need this kind of fine grain control IMO. Once the fine adjustment mode is available in M3, I think it should track the cursor 1:1 however.

Yes, i agree on this.

In fact, the fine control is already there now, just hold [Cntrl].

In M3, sliders will always track 1:1.

No way! Hadn't realised that. However, I reckon it's a bit too fine; using the entire screen I can still only move a control by about a 10th of its range. Would it be possible in future to reduce the resolution or add an option to set how fine the fine control mode is?

[TheGuysanIdiot]

Jo,

More on track sliders and knobs.

[Knobs]

For example load Synthia and turn the cutoff control with the mouse the values update quickly to get close to the correct setting. You then hold down the CTRL key and make fine adjustments job done (OK add Sylenth1 hor/vert control in M3).

[Sliders]

I think it should work in a similar fashion. Move the slider quickly to the approximate position with the mouse. Then hold down CTRL for finer adjustments.

BUT

Now I am a bit confused about the 1:1 for track sliders. Using M2 currently holding down CTRL seems to make the sliders move way too slowly without visible values I am not too sure how much the slider actually moves it looks to me like small jumps rather than a smooth movement.

What exactly does the 1:1 mean in this context?

[robenestobenz] - "I reckon it's a bit too fine" - Yes I am thinking the same.

OZ

[MuTools]

No way! Hadn't realised that. However, I reckon it's a bit too fine; using the entire screen I can still only move a control by about a 10th of its range. Would it be possible in future to reduce the resolution or add an option to set how fine the fine control mode is?

Yeah, maybe it's indeed a bit too fine.

Will be more practcal in M3

[Orphoneus]

Rack
What on earth is that tiny blue rectangle for?

It's the Pre/Post Fader switch. Please see http://www.mutools.com/mulab/docs/racks.html for more detailed info.

In a future version, there will be a tooltip for this GUI component.

Ah, didn't know.

By the way, I switch processes on and off very often to experiment with different settings. Make it a direct click? Always having to open the context menu tends to be annoying with time.

You can [Alt]+click a plugin to quickly switch it ON/OFF.

Does that help?

Yup, thanks.

Overall, while reinventing the GUI has some advantages (portability, sound preview for opening files, minimizing windows) but also a lot of disadvantages. GUIs are delicate things and need usability studies. Getting it right is lots of work!

I agree.

But it's not a choice anymore.

MUTOOLS software will use its own GUI system now and in the future, especially for multi-platform reasons.

But at the same time i can also tell you that Apple is not very gentle in documenting OSX for developers! Really it's very difficult to find the right info. And once you find it, chance is real it's outdated/incompatible in the next OSX version.

Oh? I liked the Mac Dev Center, though I agree that it can be hard to get an overall picture and to find custom things (like creating GUI elements programatically without Interface Builder).

I'm sorry for these critical notes on OS X.

No worries. It's just that the OS X GUI is "tried & true", whereas you're on your own here. I don't mind either, I just care whether the result works for me.

I don't understand how extending a part to the left is supposed to work.

Principle is: The content of the part is kept at its original position.

Ah, it works in the demo file, but doesn't in the project I made; parts simply won't extend to the left. Will investigate; probably has to do with the loop points.

Sequence view
The bar numbering is weird (-5 ??) and doesn't seem to reflect anything.
What are these "Start", "End", "Loop" things supposed to do??

Last question first: They can be used to loop a section within the sequence.

Now if you have a sequence with 8 bars, and you set a sequence loop from bar 5 to 7, and the sequence is played from 1.1.0000 in the composition, then bars 1 to 6 of the sequence logically come before 1.1.0000 so that's where the min sign comes in.

Hope this clarifies things.

I don't get it yet. These relative numbers should associated with a part, not with the whole sequence, no? Will make a new forum topic about this.

Quantization
There's a bug with quantization settings, they don't take effect immediately. They only do when changing from NoGrind to grid. New setting are saved however, and work when reopening the sesssion.

I dont see what you mean.

If i change the grid, it has immediate effect i.e. new actions are snapped to the new grid.

Oh! I didn't find "Edit > Select Grid" and thought that "Sequence > Quantize Notes" would set the grid.

Misc
Sampla
Sound preview when clicking on the keyboard doesn't apply amplitude settings, I think. Had to change volume constrantly.
No preview for different velocities.

Although sample preview indeed is very basic (it's a simple preview), playing the previewed samples via the MIDI keyboard is velocity-sensitive.

I think the settings for individual samples should be integrated into the keyboard view.
Switching between the sampler, starting / stopping a (composition) loop with the space bar and sample settings is quite time consuming.

Can you please elaborate on this, eventually using some screenshots/mockups.

New thread forthcoming.

Tempo Changes
I have imported a midi file with a tempo changes. They got imported into a separate tempo track, I think. They do take effect, but I can't edit them anymore.

Two ways:

Right-click the tempo -> "Edit Tempo Changes"
Right-click the timebar -> "Edit Tempo Changes"

Found it, thanks.

Plugins
The linear phase graphical equalizer vst on apulsoft doesn't display its GUI.
Very long parameter lists shoot through the bottom of the screen.

Then i assume it's a VST 2.3 plugin (or even older) on a MacIntel.
On MacIntel, only VST 2.4 plugins show their proper GUI.
Essentially that's a decission of Apple/Steinberg.

VST 2.3 on PowerPC, but the effect is the same.

Better Mac OS X integration
Applications are distributed as bundle, there should be no folder containing both the program and presets / samples / helper files..
User settings / saves etc go into $HOME/Library/Application Support/MULAB.

We want MU.LAB to be as platform independent + as portable as possible.

Doesn't work well with the multi-user environment. Ordinary users don't have write access to the /Applications folder where their presets are saved.

We want MU.LAB to run from a USB stick.

The folder where presets etc. are saved could be made configurable by the user. Also, the user needs to put all his VST plugins onto the USB drive, so he'll have to fiddle with paths anyway.

This helps in making MU.LAB better!

Glad to help.

[robenestobenz]

Now I am a bit confused about the 1:1 for track sliders. Using M2 currently holding down CTRL seems to make the sliders move way too slowly without visible values I am not too sure how much the slider actually moves it looks to me like small jumps rather than a smooth movement.

What exactly does the 1:1 mean in this context?

1:1 is inapplicable to this context, because we're talking fine control, it'd be something 1:0.X.

1:1 simply means that, within its range, the slider will always travel the same distance as the cursor.