a modest wishlist (I hope)
TL;DR This kinda turned into an introduction post as well as a feature request/wishlist. If it's too wordy or rambly, go ahead and skip down to the actual list. No offense taken lol
Just got Drambo after thinking about it for probably too long and I think I'm in love (and kicking myself for not pulling the trigger earlier).
Spent about a day getting my bearings - thankfully, all of my modular frustration was burned on VCV Rack a few years ago and while I managed to sidestep the inevitable fall down the bottomless pit of burying myself in ever bigger loans so I could build the physical rack of my dreams (and all of the hair-pulling voltage and ground noise issues that go with it lol), the awe over all of the insane possibilities that modular offers stuck with me.
The first contraption I've decided to build felt a bit lofty, but I'm making decent progress on it (PatchStorage upload hopefully coming soon), but it's also been a minor breeding ground for "man, I wish I could do X or Y."
Luckily, a lot of it seems fairly minor (or, I'd assume as much, not having any visibility into the source code, and all). I also realize that BeepStreet is either a one man team, or at the very least a really small team, and without knowing what the backlog looks like or what's on the menu for upcoming features, I'm coming into this post with hopeful, but realistic, optimism and no expectations that I'm owed anything. It's really just one "real" ask followed by a couple of super minor ones.
My wishlist, as of now:
- I love the idea of building highly customized racks and, with that, highly customized control surfaces and panels to go with them. In a perfect world, Drambo would have a bunch of empty, different sized panels (or better, a single resizable one) and offer a grid system to position control elements like knobs and sliders, but that feels like it'd be a hell of an undertaking/overhaul (unless...? lol) and what's there now is pretty useful already.
The ACTUAL ask: One issue I ran into is that I can't seem to hide/unhide single-tap UI elements. For example, the waveform preview/loader in the Sampler modules, or dropdowns like the ones also found in the Sampler modules (to select Launch, Mode, etc) or the Shaper (to select distortion type). The ability to manage visibility of these elements would lend itself really nicely to building tightly focused custom patches/racks where control/interaction is intended to happen through the controls that the patch creator exposes and it would help keep things less cluttered in Compact mode.
- I wish we had a bit more space for text labels before they get truncated, where the middle gets replaced with ellipses. Maybe an allowance for two lines, where feasible?
- Minor bug, but def not a showstopper: I noticed if you use an emoji in a text label, the bottom half of the label gets cut off.
- Just a nice-to-have if it's feasible and there's time for it eventually: the ability to slap a custom skin on a panel in the form of a PNG or a JPEG or whatever. It'd be fun to add a personal touch, or play around with branding or self-promotion, for people creating and sharing patches.
That's either it for now or I'm drawing blanks. So far, none of the above has had any effect on my growing obsession with Drambo. Looking forward to using it a lot more and the near and long term.
EDITS (as my I-Wish-I-Coulds continue to catch back up to me):
As these things tend to go, I submitted my post, went to go grab a drink, and another one came to me:
- It would be pretty nice if the waveform screen in the samplers (the full size one that comes up when you hit preview) showed how long your sample is in samples, or ms, or time divisions based on your current tempo or even better, if it was configurable to show any of the above (or other units or measurement I may not be thinking of).
Another one surfaced:
- The ability to set custom default knob positions, per module instance, would be an absolute godsend. Example: say I'm running 4 audio outputs into a mixer and I want to hear just one of the signals from the mixer for a moment - or I want one to stand out a little more while I adjust the chain. Right now, I quiet or "mute" the others by cranking the volume in the mixer to 0. If I want it back at 0.75 (the default for a freshly added knob), I have to type that in... And that's if I want it at 0.75 which is easy to remember. If I had each knob at a specific position, the problem becomes more difficult to manage. If the double tap/context menu for the knobs had a "set default" option, managing stuff like this would be a ton easier... And expanding that out to all control elements would be even better.
Comments
Is this annoying yet? 😅