Sorting sound names in mixer
Hello Marc and support team,
Please consider sorting Sounds in mixer at least by name, and better - put a few most recently used ones on top for ease to find them.
Presently they seem to appear in random order, so quickly finding the one you know by name is impossible unless you read through close to a hundred sound names.
You may add a button "Sort by name" too.
Thank you!
Victor
Comments
The order is not quite random, It matches the order in which you've set your soundfonts (first the fluid list, then the zerberus one) and then follows the instrument definitions as provided by that soundfont. For MuseScore_General this is the General MIDI standard.
Are you aware that once you open the list, you can type the first letter of the sound you're looking for, and the list will jump to the next item starting with that letter. It might make your life easier while awaiting a redesign.
And for MS4 the mixer is one of the things to undergo a major redesign, where sound selection indeed should also be taken into account. See https://musescore.org/en/node/305002 for the first draft proposal post on that.
To add to the point about it not being random - within a soundfont, the sounds are listed in the order they appear, and for the default soundfont, that means the General MIDI order, which is pretty logical really. Like, all the pianos are together, all the guitars together, all the saxophones together, etc. This is actually much better than alphabetic order for the most common use for the Mixer - changing one guitar sound for another, or one piano for another, etc. The replacement sound is likely to be just above or below the current sound, so you can find it even without knowing its name. Most other changes would be from the Instruments dialog, not the Mixer.
That said, for the cases where you do know a specific sound you want to select in the Mixer, the ability to sort by name could be a useful addition to the existing search by letter function.
Would it be possible to associate the sound assignments made in the Mixer to the name of the soundfont, rather than the order in which that font is placed in the synthesizer? It drives me crazy that I have to figure out where to place a new soundfont (indeed-replace- for order's sake) so that my instrument assignments are not messed up. If the soundfont assignments were associated by name, that would eliminate that issue.
BTW.. I'd send you guys some money, if I could. I'd like to help, but am not a programmer.
Thanks for this amazingly wonderful program.