Hierarchy for instrument and channel change in Mixer

I understand what you are saying. I suppose the reason they are separated is because they are actually using different audio samples, and I presume different midi #'s. And because it may be necessary to adjust each effect's base volume separately.

I fear if they -pizz and -trem are hidden, then it might be difficult for people to find.

It would be nice if all the effects for each part (e.g. Violin, Violin-pizzicato, Violin-tremelo) were grouped together somehow...maybe in a hierarchy way so that you could expand out the violin to see the pizz & trem. And it would be nice to be able to adjust the base volume for violin and automatically have the violin-pizz & violin-trem adjust in sync. (But then also have a way so they don't adjust together).

Just did a quick mock-up of what what I'm envisioning. Basically would have a button on the left (or maybe just under) of each part which would expand out when pressed, and display controls for each effect for that part. And controls for each effect could either be linked (or locked?) to parent base instrument such that adjusting parent volume would adjust settings for each effect, or could be unlinked (or unlocked?) so user can manually adjust volume & other settings for each effect:

Maybe have better icons or wording.

Maybe instead of having an expand button, maybe just have it such that if press anywhere on a part's part, then would expand out. And maybe instead of having a link/unlock button, maybe just have then linked until user changes.

Just throwing this out there for comments.

>> "but then it looks like we would have all effects for any single instrument displayed, or not displayed. I've never used tremolo, but very frequently use pizz. "

well it's hard to say how to handle. Maybe add a special setting in the .ini for users that never ever used pizz or trememlo to selectively disalbe them. But then may noone will know about that setting and never use it. Or maybe user could manually edit instruments.xml to remove the pizz and trem (you might even be able to do that now...I'm not sure).

>> "It would be nice if there could be ONE mute and One solo for each instrument (as there is now), but GLOBALLY applied to each of the instrument effects"

I think so too. And now tha ti'm thinking about it, there is not really a need for each of the sub-effects having the "Drumset" checkbox...so maybe that entire line of checkboxes for "Mute, Solo, Drumeset" could be removed for effects.

>> "Maybe hovering over an instrument could gen a pop-up windows that advises the user to click the instrument to see effect settings and make adjustments. This would work, as long as the pop-up never got in the way and obscured anything."

I like that. Would avoid taking up space.

Sorry for changing to my title! ;)

See this .

@lasconic: This should be tagged with "ui" and/or "ux"...

I've been experimenting around with what I'm calling "Minimalist hierarchical mixer with tabs" design which displays only mixer info for *Parts* at the top level, each Part in a single line:

Everything else is hidden under the expansion button because for most part when mixing, you just want to operate on the Part (not individual channels) and you only care about Solo, Mute, and Volume for that Part. The rest are details that can be hidden away. This makes the mixer ui EXTREMELY compact...so compact it could probably be a QDockableWidget so you can dock it above or under your Palette or And then each part can be expanded out:

There will be a QTabWidget below that part on the left which will have each tab named according to the channel name, that way for instruments like strings, it will have 3 tabs: regular, pizz, and tremolo, so you can easily swap between each tab. Each tab will allow to set different soundfont as well as adjust the midi output settings, which are clearly grouped together in a QGroupBox. The offset volume will increase or decrease volume from the Part's baseline volume. For most cases you would have offset volume at 0 because you want your regular, pizz, and tremolo roughly the same, but the nice thing with this design is you can adjust on a case-by-case basis. Then the to the right of the tab you can selectively mute voices and adjust the panning for that part.

Yes! Brilliant!

Another approach that had been brought up by @lasconic the other day on IRC (and later git mentioned in PR #3550) is to just not show those (additional, non-default) channels if they are not used in the current score.

hmm...I don't know...the downside is people might not know how to find the unused channels. I like my secreenshot above where they aren't shown unless you select the instrument...my problem is I never finalized my branch. :(

@ericfontainejazz you do propose a dilemma. If someone is trying to set up the score with the correct playback prior to using a staff text to include the playing style unused channels will not be visible even though the user may intend to use the channel later. Hiding unused channels does make the mixer smaller so I consider that a BIG PLUS. The mixer is too big, and I think anything that can make it smaller is an improvement. Marc's idea to add a checkbox that says display all channels would be a fix to this.

I have a question since I don't compile my own code and haven't seen this discussed. What happens if the user, for example, inserts a pizz. on a violin assigning the voice, then deletes it, will the channel then revert back to invisible?

I think that proper documentation on the new mixer will help people to understand what is happening with the invisible channels. Of course most of the questions asked on the forums could be answered with a simple link to the handbook...but I digress.

Maybe we use the simple "hide unused" approach for 2.2 and and (your) improved one in master?
Maybe have a config setting to show unused channels?

First we need to get it to work though, current attempts can be seen in https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/compare/2.2...lasconic:mixer-hid…

Regarding the concern about the "missing" channels -

It occurs to me that having access to these channels before you have staff texts and then notes assigned to those channels is going to be of limited value. Otherwise, you're flying pretty blind - how will you know if you need to turn the pizz violin up or down if you can't listen? Maybe you are hoping to be able to apply similar settings as in another score, maybe though that is something better handled via making a template? Right now I have a sense Mixer settings are not loaded from a template; if not, maybe they should be.

Anyhow, I still like the checkbox to display all channels, but it feels less crucial to me than it did at first.

As far as I understand channel switches occur at ticks in the score, and scores from a template lose all the templates's measures, so no ticks from the template make it into the score.

True, the places where the channel switches happen are at specific ticks, but the basic definition of the channels is in the part/staff list up front. So all the info about the mixer settings for the channels is right at the top of the file along with the staff names etc.

I just did a test and it does appear Mixer settings are retained when creating a score from a template. I create a score for stirng quarter, turned the pizz channel for violin 1 way up and the tremolo channel way down, saved as a template, restarted MuseScore (see below), create a new score form that template, and sure enough my Mixer settings for those settings were intact.

Unrelated note: it has long been a pet peeve of mine that hasn't risen to the level of an actual bug report / feature request: why is it necessary to restart MuseScore before a new template is seen? I don't see an issue for this, at least, although the behavior is well-known at least to me...

In the mixer of the Songbook app as well as on MuseScore.com there always is only one entry per instrument, additional channels are ignored completely. I've just found out a couple minutes ago and reported it to support@musescore.com ;-)

Looking at the example pictures above: 'panning' should also be configurable per channel (think e.g. SATB closed score)

aha, I didn't know that panning was available for voices.

It is not, but available to channels, and those can be assigned to affect only certain voices.
And in https://musescore.org/en/node/269784 it is being discussed (amongst other things) to add channels to the 'instruments' Women and Men to be able to have different mixer entries for Soprano and Alto, resp. Tenor and Bass