Hi everyone,
I?ve been using xLights for about a month. I have a lot of software experience, and I was able to quickly mount the learning curve. I?ve used many professional packages and many time-based editors for both audio and video.
xLights does a great job at a great many things, but it has some issues in the area of its user interface or UI. Despite these issues, it?s clear that xLights is very capable and can be used to create some great shows. And, despite my great enthusiasm, I?m still struggling with many of the basic editing tasks. In short form, the UI can do a great many things; however, it's clumsy and needlessly time-consuming due to its layout.
Here is a list of the things that I?ve found that could be used to improve the software:
Cut-Copy-Paste in the Sequencer
The Cut-Copy-Paste operation in xLights is overall the biggest area that needs improvement. I find that more time is spent with clicking, zooming, and scrolling along with Copy and Paste than anything else. Accordingly, these things should work flawlessly except that they don?t.
For background, I?m using a Mac with macOS Big Sur 11.2.1, the latest edition. When I mention the Control Key, I?m speaking, of course about the Mac's Command key. I have a PC as well, and it is available to use, but this is my primary workstation. I?ve seen no indication that the Mac version is any less capable than the Windows version for the types of things I?m doing.
Copying - selecting things to copy. I don?t know about the common practice, but I find it necessary to have the timing track ON nearly always. Can anyone give me a use case for turning it OFF, apart from using the selection tool? The behavior of clicking inside a cell seems to go either one of two ways: 1) the cell space is selected or 2) the cell's effect is selected. Selecting one the cell background sometimes selects the contents too, but the program often struggles between cell selection and effect selection.
It appears that two hotspots respond to clicks: the cell background and the cell?s contents. There is a problem whereby as the view is scaled, the hotspots within the cell?s effect are scaled as well, and at some point, the effect cannot be selected, but the cell still can. This is easily seen as you zoom out to a large view. As you hover the mouse over the effect, you may see the Splitter bar, the Left Finger, or the Right Finger, but not the center point finger. It?s gone meaning that you can now only stretch the effect but not move its horizontal center. To move the effect horizontally, you will need to zoom up to grab the center handle. Zooming up, however, you tend to lose your place in the timeline, or the section that you?re working on has now scrolled out of view. It?s a constant battle. I feel like the program is trying to teach me how to interact with it.
Of course, everything changes when the timing tracks are turned OFF. Now the selection tool is more normal, more fluid, and less restrictive. That?s nice, but now that I?ve managed to select what I want, I need to turn the timing tracks back ON to place the move. Toggling the Timing Track is just a one-click item, but it interrupts your workflow, is distracting, and can result in a lost selection if you click just one millimeter off the mark.
If the purpose of turning off the timing track is to disable the cell boundaries temporarily, then a selection modifier would be the way to go. A modifier could be a key (Control or Shift), or it could be a right-click or middle-click on the mouse. Either way, it would be a far easier way to change the selection behavior temporarily.
Zooming Behavior
Zooming the view seems to never end up on the scale that I want. That?s because the zoom scale increments are too coarse. Sometimes, or perhaps often, while editing, I sometimes need a slightly larger view. The problem here is that one zoom button click or mouse wheel click takes it too far. The timeline should be infinitely scalable without having fixed steps. You should be able to adjust the zoom with a slider and choose any value therein. Some programs do this with Control-Mouse Wheel, and it works well.
Losing your place in the edit timeline is another common problem. Thanks to Keith for recognizing this and for adding control-. and control-/. Still, the concept of where you are in the timeline seems very fluid, and it is astonishingly easy to lose your place. After selecting an effect, I like it that when you zoom in, you stay centered on it. I?d like to see a lot more of that when it comes to zooming in all contexts.
Selection Visibility
When zoomed out, the selected cells don?t look very much different than the non-selected ones. That?s because the selection outline color is so thin that it?s hard to see against most backgrounds. I?m using a giant 43? 4K monitor, and it doesn?t help. To illustrate, select any small (short) effect and zoom out to the full sequence. You cannot find the selected effect. Suggestion: Indicate selection with a narrow, 1-pixel rolling marquee around the object. The motion is eye-catching. Also, taking a tip from Autodesk, you can make better use of the status bar at the bottom of the screen to list what is currently selected. The case for this is that you type Control-C, and later when you try and Paste, you find out that nothing was copied to the clipboard. Whenever there is something selected, it should say xx-selected in the bottom bar.
Copied but not Paste-able
When pasting with Control-V, often an effect won?t paste into an apparently empty cell. Sometimes it will, but it looks like if the target space is one millisecond shorter than the source, then the copy is canceled. The only indication of a failure is your own astonishment. It?s befuddling because the target space looks exactly like every other space to the naked eye. Honestly, the expected behavior here is that either 1) the source effect is shortened to fit the space, or 2) the effect(s) to the right are either overlaid or shifted forward to make room. Option 1 seems the best choice here, but neither one is available. This makes editing tedious because you have to zoom in, adjust the neighboring effect lengths, and then zoom back out to where you were to resume the paste. This is irritating when you?re just trying to drop something into a hole.
Uneven Timing
So, where do all of these timeline errors come from? The typical case is that when a group of effects in a row is perfectly aligned with the timing track when that group is moved horizontally in the timeline, they lose their cell alignment. All of the misalignments are off by one frame, or in my case, 25ms. Not all of the moved or pasted cells misalign, just some of them. Still, tedious hand trimming is always needed, even when the source material was perfect.
Music is not timed to the microsecond when its made and that beat timings may vary along a track. We see that the Queen Mary Vamp plugin does a great job of identifying beats, but, the xLights core doesn?t make the best use of them. It looks like when a multi-effect or multi-cell range within a row is pasted, only the first element is time-aligned. The rest seem to follow their original timings. When Snap to Timing Marks is ON, what does that mean? It seems like it only applies to one cell at a time, not a group of cells. There needs to be a way to use an intelligent algorithm to map all of the inserted or moved entities to the destination timing marks.
Music sequencers have a Quantize function that does just that. I suspect that a similar function is at play here that perhaps needs some tuning parameters.
Other Idiosyncrasies
Sometimes, hitting the space bar will start or stop the play sequence. Sometimes it won?t. It depends on how the sequence was started and where you were at the time. If I use the mouse to click the Play button, the space bar no longer works to STOP. The context regarding how to interpret the space bar input changes depending on what you?re doing and that?s not a good thing. You should be able to count on the ?transport controls? always being active, except when you?re entering text.
Often, when playing back during editing, I need to stop right on a timeline point. If I hit space, the sequence might stop, or it might keep going. By the time I?ve learned, I?ve lost the spot I was looking for. If the spacebar does work, then it STOPS the sequence and resets the play head pointer. I didn?t want it to reset, I wanted it to stop right where it was. Clearly, I should have used PAUSE instead, BUT, where is the keyboard command for that?
I wish that the spacebar would do Play/Pause. I wish that as a general principle, the play head would tend to stay where it last stopped. That way, I can listen to a little bit, stop, play some more, stop, etc., without navigating with the mouse. HOWEVER, if I do use the mouse, it shouldn?t disturb the play head if at all possible.
Replacing Effects
It?s nice that when you have an existing effect in the timeline you can drop any other effect onto it and it will replace that effect with a new one of the same duration. But why doesn?t this work with Copy/Paste? If I pick up a placed effect using Control-C and drop it onto another existing effect with Control-V to replace it, it doesn?t work. Why? Would the behavior of this change depending on an enabled timing track?
Suggestions for Enhancement
When building a sequence, we often use a lot of repetitive, short-lived effects. Sometimes, we need a whole string of them along the timeline. It would be nice if there were a Duplicate function that would duplicate the current cell into the next one on the timeline. This feature would have an optional number of copies input so that you could insert an effect N times in a row with one action. You could assign a ?Skip? value for bonus points so that every Nth cell is filled.
Thanks for reading my notes and for your great work.
