Fractal Talk

[ᛗᛜᛜᚺDᛜᎶ Ꮤᛨᚳᚴ]

Haha!!

Isn't that part of the inherent issue with any UI? The easier we make it the dumber
and more incompetent we become as humans??

Sure. We can argue that offloading some of that mental capacity to machines allows
us freedom to pursue other activities. Like porn and parlays. :lol

Take GPS and mobile tracking. The sense of direction and spatial recognition that our
species cultivated over thousands upon thousands of generations is being squandered
as people rely on the machines and tech to do the work for us.

And forget about expecting people to be able to read and locate themselves on a 2D map.
East/West/North/South are increasingly archaic for people with access to the tech that
makes the 4 directions irrelevant and unrecognizable to us.

Essentially, making everything easier conspires to make us fatter, lazier, dumber, and increasingly
ineffective in meatspace. Unless we make a conscious choice to counteract the trend in our
own life.

Fun story on this topic/idea.

I know a Sergeant on the local police department who is the head of training for his division. A couple of years back, he was telling me that many of the new hires for the department are just "stealing air" (as in, their existence is worthless). In one incident, he was riding along with a trainee who had been on the force for about 3 months. They get a call for a domestic violence situation at location XYZ where officer needs assistance, and the trainee starts entering the location into his GPS unit. The Sergeant grabs the unit out of his hand and tosses it in the river they were parked next to! He explains to trainee that if he can't, after 3 months, find an address in this small community without the aid of GPS when one of his fellow officers is in need, that he was going to have to find a new job. Now, he did break probably several laws regarding his actions including littering and theft, but the point is, it is everywhere and only getting worse. Although the movie "Idiocracy" is not the best production, the concept is real and frightening.

 

[Rock Chalk]

I think the Axe-FXIII is already absurdly more powerful than the competition and creating a unit that is even more powerful benefits such a vanishingly small number of use cases that it probably simply isn't worth it.

YMMV of course

Yep, that's why I said imo......but, I'm thinking that number is bigger than you think......

 

[JiveTurkey]

It's weird. There's kind of this point where we get to bending over backwards to keep things difficult in defense of things that are more difficult than others. Getting your PHD should be difficult. Practicing law should be difficult. Rocket science should be difficult. Guitar gear; not so much. Obviously poo reactions welcome

 

[laxu]

Haha!!

Isn't that part of the inherent issue with any UI? The easier we make it the dumber
and more incompetent we become as humans??

Sure. We can argue that offloading some of that mental capacity to machines allows
us freedom to pursue other activities. Like porn and parlays. :lol

Take GPS and mobile tracking. The sense of direction and spatial recognition that our
species cultivated over thousands upon thousands of generations is being squandered
as people rely on the machines and tech to do the work for us.

And forget about expecting people to be able to read and locate themselves on a 2D map.
East/West/North/South are increasingly archaic for people with access to the tech that
makes the 4 directions irrelevant and unrecognizable to us.

Essentially, making everything easier conspires to make us fatter, lazier, dumber, and increasingly
ineffective in meatspace. Unless we make a conscious choice to counteract the trend in our
own life.

I'd say good design makes our life easier. Someone else has taken the time and effort to figure out the hard parts: How to let you achieve a task efficiently in an easy to understand manner.

I think Fractal often thinks more in terms of "how is this easiest to program?" Since we've been talking about the move block functions here, that's a perfect example. To move a block you shift its position in a matrix of rows and columns. Fractal made functions for each of those operations, and then made an UI that lets you pick a function from a list and execute it. This is easier to program, but makes little sense to the end user.

By comparison Line6 made a "pick and place" system in Helix where you grab the block, then use your cursor to determine its new place in the signal chain and after that it performs the function needed: probably a "put this block's data object in this place in this data set representing the rows and blocks." The user experience directly replicates a thing we do every day - pick stuff up and put it down elsewhere.

The end result is the same and we don't feel dumber having used Helix's system.

You could also say that GPS and searching for addresses lets us avoid perusing a phone book and trying to find the right street on a big paper map to figure out where we need to go. But that paper map was also an improvement over verbal instructions like "you just walk in that direction on this road, and when you see a fork in the road, you go left, turn right at the 2nd big rock, pay the troll under the bridge and you'll be in town in no time!"

 

[la szum]

It's weird. There's kind of this point where we get to bending over backwards to keep things difficult in defense of things that are more difficult than others. Getting your PHD should be difficult. Practicing law should be difficult. Rocket science should be difficult. Guitar gear; not so much. Obviously poo reactions welcome

Huh? No offense, JT... but that seems absurd to me. How am I making
walking uphill hard. How am I bending over backwards to make sure the
Fractal UI is locked in? Did I do some crazy ass Yoga here to invent an
instrument that is forever challenging (and inspiring for some of us) to play?

Guitar is hard (and fun!). Brutally so. Same for any instrument and the gear tied to it.
Now if you want to dabble with the gear without the challenges of also having to
navigate an instrument then I can jive with your argument.

And once we have done the work and put in the effort to learn a community, and its streets, or an instrument
and its notes and nuances, then we can more "easily" enjoy the fruits of that labour. It's assuming we can get
there without the labour/effort/challenge that I take issue with. In my world effort is an absolute.


Gravity motherfuckers!

 

[la szum]

I'd say good design makes our life easier. Someone else has taken the time and effort to figure out the hard parts: How to let you achieve a task efficiently in an easy to understand manner.

I think Fractal often thinks more in terms of "how is this easiest to program?" Since we've been talking about the move block functions here, that's a perfect example. To move a block you shift its position in a matrix of rows and columns. Fractal made functions for each of those operations, and then made an UI that lets you pick a function from a list and execute it. This is easier to program, but makes little sense to the end user.

By comparison Line6 made a "pick and place" system in Helix where you grab the block, then use your cursor to determine its new place in the signal chain and after that it performs the function needed: probably a "put this block's data object in this place in this data set representing the rows and blocks." The user experience directly replicates a thing we do every day - pick stuff up and put it down elsewhere.

The end result is the same and we don't feel dumber having used Helix's system.

You could also say that GPS and searching for addresses lets us avoid perusing a phone book and trying to find the right street on a big paper map to figure out where we need to go. But that paper map was also an improvement over verbal instructions like "you just walk in that direction on this road, and when you see a fork in the road, you go left, turn right at the 2nd big rock, pay the troll under the bridge and you'll be in town in no time!"

By pay the "troll" did you mean to say "strawman?"

 

[la szum]

Fun story on this topic/idea.

I know a Sergeant on the local police department who is the head of training for his division. A couple of years back, he was telling me that many of the new hires for the department are just "stealing air" (as in, their existence is worthless). In one incident, he was riding along with a trainee who had been on the force for about 3 months. They get a call for a domestic violence situation at location XYZ where officer needs assistance, and the trainee starts entering the location into his GPS unit. The Sergeant grabs the unit out of his hand and tosses it in the river they were parked next to! He explains to trainee that if he can't, after 3 months, find an address in this small community without the aid of GPS when one of his fellow officers is in need, that he was going to have to find a new job. Now, he did break probably several laws regarding his actions including littering and theft, but the point is, it is everywhere and only getting worse. Although the movie "Idiocracy" is not the best production, the concept is real and frightening.

Wow!

Not sure if you like to read, MW, but if you do this is a really mind-blowing
book on GPS and the vast cultural and biological impact on our species. For
good and ill.

 

[KHAAAAAAANNNNNNN!!!!!!!!]

Fractal gets endless shit for playing chess when everyone else is playing checkers.

Chess is hard. lol

 

[Orvillain]

All I know is, Fractal, Line6, and now Neural, have my beautiful money coins!!

 

[luckymethod]

So today I put a patch together on the front interface.

The more I think about it, the more I'm starting to think that the difficulty really comes down to having to build shunts yourself.

To me the most counterintuitive thing is how pushing the rotary wheel should really be doing the job of the enter button and viceversa. I know how it works but I can't seem to build the muscle memory for it.

 

[shanesiegle]

If these were operating systems, Fractal would be Linux, Helix would be Windows or Mac, and QC would be an iPad.
Linux has always had that same “well that’s the way it fucking is. It works, doesn’t it? WELL DOES IT?!” Attitude, when it comes to UI.

Agreed, but once you know it, easy.

 

[State of Epicicity]

Wow!

Not sure if you like to read, MW, but if you do this is a really mind-blowing
book on GPS and the vast cultural and biological impact on our species. For
good and ill.

That one looks interesting as hell. Cool you ended up trying more by Greg Milner! I only read the one.

 

[deadpool_25]

Oh it is perfectly acceptable. It is just a design decision or philosophy difference between the others, that I think leads towards the UX complaints that often pop up.

Basically - Fractal expect you to pull up your big boy pants, which is quite a large expectation it turns out... whereas the others know that we're all drivelling idiots who need help at every turn, and so they do that coz they want our beautiful delicious money coins.

The ability to run shunts both horizontally and vertically, and the ability to run a bunch of shunts from one block to multiple blocks, is part of what makes the Fractal grid so powerful. I truly hope (and expect) they will never abandon that.

I'm not sure that's an issue people have with building on the interface anyway? I could be wrong but I think the primary issue is just the need to cursor/page/scroll around using various buttons and scroll wheel actions.

I know there are some folks that are solidly against a touchscreen, but I'm pretty sure the ability to tap what you want, double tap to edit, swipe to access other pages, etc. would alleviate a LOT of bitching.

 

[laxu]

The ability to run shunts both horizontally and vertically, and the ability to run a bunch of shunts from one block to multiple blocks, is part of what makes the Fractal grid so powerful. I truly hope (and expect) they will never abandon that.

I'm not sure that's an issue people have with building on the interface anyway? I could be wrong but I think the primary issue is just the need to cursor/page/scroll around using various buttons and scroll wheel actions.

I know there are some folks that are solidly against a touchscreen, but I'm pretty sure the ability to tap what you want, double tap to edit, swipe to access other pages, etc. would alleviate a LOT of bitching.

My only beefs with the grid are slowly scrolling through block types (instead of e.g Helix style list), and having to manage the connections between blocks. They tend to break when you move blocks around and so on.

Technically it could be just a node tree (node "Amp" output connects to node "Cab" input) where you don't need to care about shunts. Behind the scenes Fractal probably builds one out of the grid anyway. There's no reason you can't do this with the blocks just aligned to a grid, just without the need to insert shunts.

When Fractal moves to a touchscreen UI, it would make more sense to drag connections from node A to node B instead of tapping a grid slot to insert a shunt.

 

[GTR37]

My only beefs with the grid are slowly scrolling through block types (instead of e.g Helix style list), and having to manage the connections between blocks. They tend to break when you move blocks around and so on.

Technically it could be just a node tree (node "Amp" output connects to node "Cab" input) where you don't need to care about shunts. Behind the scenes Fractal probably builds one out of the grid anyway. There's no reason you can't do this with the blocks just aligned to a grid, just without the need to insert shunts.

When Fractal moves to a touchscreen UI, it would make more sense to drag connections from node A to node B instead of tapping a grid slot to insert a shunt.

I feel like it should just auto populate the IN and Out block
And connect them then just drag a block to a slot like you do in Quick build
If you want to change the input blocks just click on them. But I figure 90% of user are going to have input and a signal going through to and out put

 

[laxu]

I feel like it should just auto populate the IN and Out block
And connect them then just drag a block to a slot like you do in Quick build
If you want to change the input blocks just click on them. But I figure 90% of user are going to have input and a signal going through to and out put

While you can do template presets, it would be cool if Fractal expanded the quick build for common signal chains, like IN1 - Amp - Cab - Reverb - OUT1 for example.

 

[Orvillain]

Is the FM9 hard to use?

People are interesting and Youtube takes it to a new level. I keep scratching my head. Especially when I see these recent Helix vs Fractal reviews ... it's ridiculous. In any review of the Fractal, they faithfully repeat the standing narrative of the Fractal gear is "really hard to use", "has a...

forum.fractalaudio.com

This is a classy and well thought out thread!!

 

[Piing]

And even better with a Wrecker Liverpool running hot


... unless you're a chicken afraid of ghosts


Long story: I was adding a very subtle Dual Chromatic Pitch at +12 and-12 and a little bit of CE-2 (both in mono). While playing, I realized that the result resembled something like ghost notes. So I disengaged the Pitch Shifter and the Chorus, and I started playing with Supply Sag, B+Time Constant and AC Line frequency. Now I have no need to go back to these monotone artifact generators. Enjoy liberating the spirits of the amp tubes!

 

[Joshual-L]

View attachment 29450
And even better with a Wrecker Liverpool running hot


... unless you're a chicken afraid of ghosts


Long story: I was adding a very subtle Dual Chromatic Pitch at +12 and-12 and a little bit of CE-2 (both in mono). While playing, I realized that the result resembled something like ghost notes. So I disengaged the Pitch Shifter and the Chorus, and I started playing with Supply Sag, B+Time Constant and AC Line frequency. Now I have no need to go back to these monotone artifact generators. Enjoy liberating the spirits of the amp tubes!

Can someone explain what is the B+ constant?
Explain it to me like I’m a guitar player please .

 

[Piing]

Can someone explain what is the B+ constant?
Explain it to me like I’m a guitar player please .

In guitar player terms, is something that if attempted to modify in real amplifier could get you electrocuted, and burn the house

Basically: when the power supply doesn't have enough power for the tubes requirement to handle a signal peak, the current drops. The B+ Time Constant is the time that the power supply takes to fall and recover to a normal value when that happens.


In Cliff terms:

B+ Time Constant

Should I think of the like the Attack parameter on a compressor or is it like the release on a compressor?

forum.fractalaudio.com