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Zooming issues

Hi,

I find myself getting "thrown around" a bit when it comes to zooming. Either I'm totally misunderstanding how to zoom efficiently in Qtractor or there may be room for improvement; not sure...

I've shown an example of my confusion over on https://www.twitch.tv/videos/464639835 (be sure to unmute to hear my comments)

Also, it would be great to be able to configure a single zoom toggle shortcut. The behavior would just toggle the zoom method between horizontal and vertical. This would obviously only yield a benefit if a visual indicator were displayed showing the current zoom mode.

Thank you in advance for any feedback.

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rncbc's picture

hi,

sure there are always room for improvement, there are always slack for one's perfect fitness & workout ;)

nevermind

problem here and now for me at least is that I fail to listen any not even a single one of the twitch.tv videos atm. (giving me network error
#2000 after 30s from start...)

sure a picture is worth a thousand but i would very much appreciate you could explain in fewer words what really confuses you :)

hyu.
cheers

Video plays fine but I'll try to describe

In general, the behavior of the zoom appears to be completely tied to the state of the thumb view. This means there's no ability to zoom in on a selection. I show this in the video where my play head is placed on measure 1 and the horizonal zoom is zoomed completely out. Now, I'd like to zoom in on the first few measures of the song (where my play head is located and even where my edit range is defined).. I zoom in once and bam!, the arranger view is shifted quite a bit over to the right and I'm dropped into the middle of the song (roughly 8 minute track at 97BPM). In other words, zoom in works as designed but the design doesn't serve the user... instead, the user has to serve the design.

Basically, I think there's room to associate the zoom with what is selected. That would go a long way in terms of serving the user and avoiding work-flow disruption.

My other ideas would be to make it possible to toggle between zoom horizontal and zoom vertical. If that could be done, a keybinding could be assigned to the toggle and the user would be able to very easily control those modes with a single action rather than having to remember and correctly use 2. Of course, a toggle capability only makes sense if the currently selected zoom mode were made visible somewhere. Perhaps a ______ for horizontal and a | for vertical.

Additional zoom modes would also be very welcome:

zoom out full (based on selected zoom mode as described above)
zoom in full (same)

I'm not even sure zoom reset is living up to its real potential. Perhaps the user could define (in some way) what that should actually do? Like, perhaps a % setting?

Thanks for the discussion :)

rncbc's picture

(yeah the video may play in normal wide-band circumstances which is not quite what i have atm. sorry about that)

anyway, please take note that zooming in qtractor have these two ways to be actuated:

1. the View menu/shortcut commands: zoom reference point is (always) the center of the main view be that of main tracks or piano-roll (not at all dependent on the thumb-view whatsoever);
2. the Ctrl+mouse-wheel: zooming reference point is (of course) the current mouse cursor pointer;

you may argue that reference point for 1. could be the center of current selection, the center of edit-head/tail cursors or even the current play-head position... however the way it is now--the center of the current viewport--was in fact settled by users demand (and i can count way more than one decade ago ;))

hth.
cheers

ps. of course, zoom reset is about yes, resetting to default initial 100% zoom level; as if you never changed zoom level at all while running qtractor.

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