(no subject)

[eirias]

The ergonomic difference between point-and-click and keyboard shortcuts is amazing, and I've somehow managed not to notice it before now. I had some tedious audio processing to do this morning, and I took the time to set up keyboard shortcuts so I didn't have to navigate the menus. Observations: 1) my hands and wrists are way less fatigued; 2) batches that used to take me ten minutes apiece took me four minutes. I only wish I'd bothered to figure this out two years ago! I'd better write those shortcuts down for next time.

Comments

[marphod.livejournal.com]

Mouse usages is, generally, awful for UI.

[trygve.livejournal.com]

It's true. It's done wonders for usability, and lowering the learning curve. But it's got nothing on keyboard control for efficiency.

[kirin]

That reminds me, I really should implement a keyboard shortcut for the new command I just added to this program...

[glasseye.livejournal.com]

Yeah, keyboard shortcuts rock! Macros can be very powerful too, if you're doing the same set of tasks on a large number of files. But at that point a script is really the proper tool...

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately there's no macro facility in the particular sound program I use to manipulate my MIDIs and turn them into WAVs, nor is there a scripting language AFAICT. Do you know of a good way to do such things from outside of a program? -- a Windows utility of some kind? I once tried downloading some general-purpose macro tool, but I couldn't get it to work properly, and of course there's always the spyware issue with anything free and unknown...

[glasseye.livejournal.com]

Well, is an open-source midi to wav convertr, which can run in the console (in Linux at least - there are windows ports but I'm not sure if they have a console version). I'd bet that it can be easily scripted. (http://timidity.sourceforge.net)

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link! I'll definitely have to check that out for next time. Any thoughts on the sound quality it produces? I'm definitely interested in time-saving strategies, but sound quality probably matters more in the end.

I don't have access to a Linux machine, but I think I have some sort of emulator installed, if that'll do the trick.

[vja2.livejournal.com]

What kinds of things are you doing with midi & wav files?

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I write my stimuli for my experiments in MIDI so that I can manipulate them easily; then I need to record them in some audio format recognizable by the experiment program, which in this case is pretty much WAV only. While they're MIDIs sometimes I want to do things to all of them like transpose them to another key, change the tempo, or equalize note length/velocity; but as it stands I have to do all the commands individually, by hand, which is time consuming. (I do a bit of manipulating the audio file too, but thankfully both Adobe Audition & GoldWave have good batch-processing capabilities.)