User talk:PeterSampson/Proposal: Improvement of Monitoring UI

Playthrough and persistence of monitoring

Gale 03Aug11: Does this Proposal request that:

1. Monitoring should be on by default (which could be part of a GSoC project), and/or
2. Software Playthrough should also be on by default, and/or
3. a separate control for software playthrough should be provided in Meter Toolbar?

• Peter 21Sep11: No to all three of those (though number 3 is an interesting idea which I'll consider further). This proposal is concerned with making it more obvious to the user what is going on with monitoring.
  • Peter 11Oct11: Though the more I think about it monitoring always "on" could well be a good solution to the issue of not knowing whether it is on or not.
  • Steve 11Oct11:Strongly disagree about software playthrough being on by default. On Linux software playthrough can often prevent Audacity from recording and there is no obvious indication of what is wrong.
    • Gale 12Oct11: In addition to which all the users recording YouTube would get feedback echoes. I wasn't recommending playthrough should be on, just pointing out a) the proposal wasn't clear b) there's an issue especially for those wanting to play tapes and records in Audacity without recording (including people doing a "test recording") that they expect monitoring to turn the sound on as well. There is a big GUI divorce between clicking in the record meter and turning playthrough on. A possible alternative is for monitoring to turn playthrough on, but when pressing "Record" or "Play", playthrough is turned off again (unless the menu item is on).
      • Peter 12Oct11: Sorry Gale, Steve's comment came because I mistakenly originally put "Software Playthroug always on" in my previos comment rather than "Monitoring always on", subsequently corrected after reading Steve's comment.

Documentation

The Meter Toolbar page in the manual attempts to document monitoring and how to use it, however users report that it can be hard to find in the manual (witnessed by the large number of postings on the forum). The relevant tutorials in the manual explain about monitoring too, but I am not sure how often they are read by users.

• Gale 03Aug11: Do we assume then they are not looking in Meter Toolbar for a way to turn on monitoring? Any idea where they are looking?
  • Peter 21Sep11: I'm pretty sure that most of them have no idea where to look at all (either on the Audacity window GUI itself or in the documentation).
    • Gale: 28Sep11 If we found and fixed the issue that stops monitoring being on by default this might make being able to find it in the Manual less of an issue.

Meter Image

One alternative possibility for an optimum (and overload) indicator that was mocked up by Bill Wharrie

• Gale: 28Sep11 Is this a playback meter or a record meter? If it is a record meter then "the red colouring of the bar would over-ride the yellow advisory colouring" in the text doesn't make sense. If the record meter is intended to be red then isn't it odd to have red over-ride red? Perhaps you shouldn't drift into meter appearance as there are lots of ideas that could be considered on Feature Requests. But if you do drift, initialised meter width and default meter range set in Preferences should probably be under consideration.
  • Peter 11Oct11: It's a record meter (see the Mic icon). This green/yellow/red could be used as the "on" indicator for the input meter, with the meter being the standard background gray when input metering is "off". Then rather than having a red bar to indicate the current level we could have broadish bold black line to indicate the current transient recording level, retaining a blue line to indicate the maximum achieved level since monitoring was turned on (as now).
    • Gale 12Oct11: I bet I won't be the only one to be confused by the green. What colour is the playback meter - does it have the same green/yellow/red? What are the recording meter bar colours when actually recording?
      • Peter 12Oct11: You would be confused by the fact that currently we have red for recording and green for playback, right? I would now envision that both meters would have the same green/red/yellow display and rather than my previous suggestion that the g/r/y should be an "on" idicator for the input meter. I now think that the colours should be an idication of the signal level, advancing along the meter as now but chaging from green to yellow when the signal is getting hot and red when it is clipping or dangerously close to clipping. The output meter should only be active when output is actually active, i.e. when playback is in operation or the user is recording with software playthrough turned "on".