Comment by Fraterkes 2 days ago
The point of knobs is that you can fit a ton of sliders in a limited space, and that you can wildly adjust them with very little movement. Both are requirments for a lot of music software. What would the alternative be?
There is absolutely no way you successfully adjust two knobs at the same time on a multitouch display, let alone while doing live music. They are barely usable one by one.
There is a reason people serious about doing music keep using physical knobs to change values in their software. I’m entirely convinced the sole reason DAWs use virtual knobs despite them being such a poor UX element is because people will map them to MIDI knobs anyway and that keeps the software and physical world looking the same.
> There is absolutely no way you successfully adjust two knobs at the same time on a multitouch display, let alone while doing live music
I do it all the time on an iPad. It handles up to 5 simultaneous controls very well.
Kind of a self fulfilling prophecy then. I had to figure out how to map the knobs to MIDI hardware because it was so hard to adjust them on screen!
At that point I guess the physical resemblance is a virtue.
How about a knob that instantly overlays a slider when you touch it?
Then it takes only knob space at rest, but offers the slider affordance and high-res control when you need it.
Maybe that would work if it popped up VERY FAST. I have never gotten along with touch screen knobs.
Some of the music production UIs seem to feature huge grids of knobs, a pop-up slider would inherently obscure some of the adjacent knobs in some way, requiring you to move the cursor away or click somewhere else to dismiss it. It would create friction if you needed to do quick adjustments across a row or column of knobs.
I think the best compromise is something that's already very similar to knobs - a "draggable text field". Different software styles this element differently, but the essence is that it's a number, where you can either click and type a new value in, or hold the mouse on the field and drag it left or right to drag through the different values. You can find this in some video and 3D editors. Sometimes these elements are styled to have arrows on the sides of the numeric value to suggest the dragging behavior.
That's effectively the same as the Apple knob modes where you can drag vertically or horizontally, except the visual slider would be locked to one orientation.
There are some music software that do this, and it looks clunky shifting between a graphic of a slider when you're moving it and a graphic of a knob when you're not.
The difference with the Apple knob is that you would be given a strong cue for what to do after you tap on the knob. The current knob design has no cue until you press and slide, when you see a value change. But you have to do it right before you get any cue. Real knobs are turned; not tapped, pressed or slid. The slider shows you an affordance that works. The knob shows you an affordance that does not.
I think multi-zone drumpads on the recent Akai MPC Live 3 provide a good middle ground, quite similar to mapping various zones on a trackpad. The Macbook touchstrip was a cool (but maybe too cool) addition as well, similarly introduced by various DAW controllers (Push, Machine, MPC Live, others).
> What would the alternative be?
Large slider which doesn’t change place, buttons to select what you are adjusting. Display the current value on the button if you need it to stay visible.
The magic of software ux is that you can actually replace things on a screen in a way you can’t on a physical device.