The instrument dropdown can be very wide (depending on available synths)
and combined with other dropdowns and the copy-checkbox in a single row,
the min. width was well above 1400px.
In order to choose which port name to display (if any) in the button,
MixerStrip::update_io_button() first chose a primary type for the input
or output. It was AUDIO in all cases, except if the route was a
MidiTrack where the primary type was MIDI.
In the latter case, it enabled the following code of update_io_button()
to show the MIDI sources feeding the MidiTrack rather than showing an
unhelpful dash.
But this simple heuristic has several shortcommings:
- Going further, tracks and busses will probably loose strong types so
the approach is not future-proof;
- It doesn't take midi busses into account, yet there is no reason for
them to be handled differently than midi tracks;
- It falls short when the midi track contains a synthesiser and is
meant to output audio.
Improve the heuristics by choosing the data type as follows:
A) If there are connected audio ports, consider audio as primary type.
B) Else, if there are connected midi ports, consider midi as primary type.
C) If there are audio ports, consider audio as primary type.
D) Else, if there are midi ports, consider midi as primary type.
These new heuristics give the same results for audio tracks and busses
(whose audio inputs have not been removed), and the same result for the
input of midi tracks (again, provided the inputs have not been tampered
with). It improves the situation for inputs of midi busses, and output
of midi tracks and busses, especially when synthesisers are in use.
- for those not in the know, this series provides a way to
remove the temporal distortion introduced when using an
audio frame-based gui for music-locked objects.
In short, the gui uses an audio frame representation to move
objects. It displays the object using frame_at_beat(), quantizing
the time value to audio frames. This is fine until the user selects
that frame but expects it to be interpreted as a beat.
Thus beat_at_frame() would not produce the user-expected beat
(temporal quantization error of up to 0.5 audio samples).
This is one method of mapping audio time to music time accurately.
- use exact beats to determine frame position.
- see comments in tempo.cc for more.
- this hasn't been done for split yet, but dragging and
trimming are supported.
