What happened? You made such basic things in V3 so difficult to do, and it seems you have no intention of making it easier in the future, based on the responses to people’s concerns.
Similar options should be clustered together, but you now have them spread all over the screen. I was FLOORED when I found out where “sample properties” was hidden. On the bottom left of the screen? Did you fail GUI 101?
And then CRUICIAL options are placed there in a way that NOBODY would be able to find, like simply being able to set a sample loop. Like being able to auto-adjust the sample loop borders to find a decently loopable point–instead you make it easy to do a crossfade that modifies the actual sample, but I still haven’t figured out where you hid the options to do that simple auto-loop-borders stuff, and I’ve multiple times looked in the poorly-written FAQ that I can’t find anything with a search. It used to be so easy to do some of these things, the visual interface made it very obvious how it worked. Now I can’t figure out hardly anything visually with this version.
It’s almost like you said “Well, we have these options we’ve had for a long time, they’re standard, and we need to utilize the screen space better, so let’s just move this here and here and here. What do you mean where they were placed before and how they’re next to each other and how they visually look helps people use it? We need to utilize the screen better, they can just read the FAQ if they don’t understand.”
This program takes being technical to a WHOLE new level, there’s nothing intuitive about this new version. It’s like it’s made for technicians, not musicians. I’ve considered myself a pretty technical person, but V3 just goes so far over my head most of the time that I don’t know what to do, and most of it is because of the way things are categorized–I can’t visually find anything.
I can’t find jack in the FAQ. It’s almost like you expect people to read the entire manual in its entirety before even starting to use the program. And the manual is written for total obsessive techheads–there’s no simple wording on anything, nothing is written in a “dummies” series of books sort of way, and it’s certainly not written for musicians. It’s like, instead of saying “this is what you use to set the loop”, you say something like “used to define the looping properties when rlehrelhfd the dlfenofeonf for the [something else that is defined in renoise itself and nowhere else]” Nothing is simple in the FAQ. Again, it’s like it isn’t written for musicians, it’s written for technicians. I’m trying to use a MUSIC program, I want musical and studio and audio equipment terminology, not PURELY computer technical terminology. I want to be able to search for musical and audio equipment properties and find what I’m looking for. With your current FAQ, that’s just not possible and hasn’t been for a while. But at least your older versions could be learned visually, so the FAQ wasn’t nearly as required.
In my opinion, any program that requires THAT kind of purely technical-based studying for THAT long is a poorly-written interface. Good interfaces you can tinker with and learn and get things done. For instance, I learned Photoshop almost completely on my own. Photoshop is written for artists. I THOUGHT Renoise was written for musicians.
V3 is NOT a program you can tinker with to learn if you come from it from purely a musician’s perspective. You’ve made this GUI as hard to use as a CLI. Sure, the CLI is very powerful, but… it’s a CLI.
I wish many of your icons were better, and I wish you had an individual icon to represent most functions. Some of the options have a visual cue such as the word “off” and we’re supposed to just guess what that means. You refuse to use color in your icons, you refuse to make your icons big enough to know what they are, it’s this constant guessing game as to what the heck the option is, and you haven’t finished doing help balloons, so people can’t hover over EVERY element on the screen to figure out what things are–I mean, at least that’s a way of learning a program–visually. But that doesn’t work in Renoise, there’s no learning this program visually. There’s no rational or logical way of learning this program without spending hours and hours reading your FAQ, which I don’t personally have the kind of attention span to be able to just sit down and read. I want to use the program, not sit there and study it for weeks without using it, especially since I’ve been using versions of it since 2004, or is it 2003?
ProTools is a BREEZE compared to Renoise V3, including the complex functions. I learned ProTools through tinkering, just like I learned Photoshop.
Please learn to cluster similar options together. If a primary option is on the top right of the screen, don’t make utterly CRUCIAL options related to it on the bottom left of the screen that don’t even show up until you click a \ *word * on the screen. Use icons that visually make sense that allow it to be told what it is other than “well, this little shape I have memorized as meaning THIS option” or “well, it says ‘off’ so that must be the right option”.
And come on: A GEAR icon that someone is supposed to click to give them different listing options for a panel? That should have been a list icon, not a gear icon. A gear icon assumes a different set of options. Like I said, this version is the most horrible somewhat-professional program visually to learn that I’ve ever run across.
I mean, if you’re going to split things up like that, and there’s not enough room on the screen, why not utilize menus at the top more and categorize them in the “standard” way that most programs with a top menu are set up? Some categorization that has some inkling of familiarity with other software, something people can use to attach with to make it easier to use.
And really, learn how to use graphics in a beneficial way, have distinct sections on the screen for specific functions, and have the ability to label areas of the screen, to label different panels, give an option to put a title on those areas of the screen. Make this a program that an everyday musician could just pick up and start using instead of this thing that you have to study the FAQ for weeks just to START using.
I understand that you’re wanting to fit a lot on the screen, but you’ve visually cut WAY too many corners in V3. It’s truly awful to try to learn. Yes, it’s pretty to look at, but that’s not what a good GUI is about.
