A friend who is an actual musician and creates actual enjoyable music presented me with his actual physical metronome, or whatever German for metronome is. It has the usual no adjustments other than speed, but the beats weren’t symmetrical…??
I havn’t taken it apart yet, it’s not my instrument, but can I assume that’s not normal?
Koz
I think the interface needs an algorithm to fill a specific length of time with a certain number of evenly spaced clicks.
Then another input box to put the repeating strong beat…so like a 2, 3, or 4 and so forth.
Another cool thing would be a swing of the weak beats.
Doesn’t “optional click track duration” do that?
Gale
How do we resolve the difference between this:
and this:
I told you some people would want even more features. 
Either ship the bicycle and the aeroplane separately, or put the bicycle in the aeroplane.
And use a plugin format that supports access keys, so blind users can navigate where they want.
Gale
How about we call the bicycle “Bicycle” and we call the Boeing 747 “Boeing 747”. Then if there’s deemed to be sufficient demand for either one or both, we ship them. If there is not deemed to be sufficient demand, then they can be made available for optional download on the wiki Plug-ins page
What I think we need to avoid is adding more and more controls onto the bicycle until it has the complexity of a 747 cockpit.
+1
So it’s settled then.
Generate > Click Track is slimmed down to a few more controls than a physical swinging weight metronome. Speed, [X] Leading beat emphasis…and I guess that’s about it. Is volume one of the current adjustments?
Generate > Rhythm Track is the collection of drum and percussion sounds, controls and management that everybody currently wants to jam into Click Track.
Koz
I like this.
I guess that’s about it.
Too simple. You need a way to set 3/4 time, 4/4 time, etc. Where to put the lead beat should you select it.
Steve assures me this lead beat thing is very desirable and I believe him.
Koz
+1
I like it.
Perhaps it would be better if the new slimmer tool had the new name, perhaps even call it “metronome” - we want it to sound like a metronome as in Steve’s demo, don’t we?
Gale
I was hoping to save that name for a “real-time” metronome.
Would that be under the Generate menu, though? It sounds like a modeless Tool to me.
I would be a bit worried about users of the existing Click Track opening the new Click Track, finding it “denuded”, then not exploring to find the bells and whistles version they’ll be more familiar with.
Gale
Wherever it is, it would be confusing to have two “metronomes”.
Also, strictly speaking, it’s not a “metronome”, it’s a “click track generator”.
You called your demo “Metronome Track”. So yes, “Track” in the name. That’s what I meant.
As the Wikipedia article says, it can be used as a “metronome”.
Gale
Sure, and you can use a screwdriver as a can opener, but that doesn’t make it a can opener, and if someone told me there was a can opener in the toolbox, then I’d expect to find a can opener, I wouldn’t be looking for a screwdriver.
Typically a metronome goes “tick, tick, tick, tick, …”
whereas a click track generally goes “Tick, tock, tock, tock, Tick, tock, tock, tock, …”
Usually for a “click track”, you want the first beat of the bar to be accented.
A “Click track” and a “Metronome” are certainly related, but they are different things, and for musicians that are familiar with the terms they conjure up quite different concepts and different uses. As Wikipedia says: “It [a click track] can also serve a purpose similar to a metronome” (emphasis mine). It doesn’t say that a click track is a metronome, or even is a kind of metronome.
My concern with this whole thing dates from an event where I wanted a metronome, picturing in my mind the above swinging weight thing with one variable. Imagine my surprise when the page of click track variables opened.
And this followed by forum postings discussing how to make it much worse.
We are designing a rhythm section, not a fancy metronome. The Click Track should give up all it’s non-metronome features to Rhythm Track save optional leading emphasis, and a setting for 3/4 time.
A metronome-like tool should have a couple of handy extensions, not a learning curve.
My sympathies go out to the people who got used to the page of variables. The people who really wanted a metronome will get a pleasant surprise and the people who really wanted a Percussion and Rhythm section should be in pig heaven.
I can think of one custom Manual entry: "If you loved the original Click Track, here’s how to get it with Rhythm Track settings.
Koz
I’ve not really been following this - but Koz’ recent comment made me go to Audacity and open up the Click Track dialog - and I see what Koz means about the complexity level.
It also led me to go back to look at 1.2.6 to see how things were then (it’s a touchstone I use quite often) - and they were a lot less complicated in the earlier version of this generator that Dominic provided:
The current version came in some time betwen 1.3.2 and 1.3.5 updated and “improved” buy the late David Sky (RIP) looking like this:
And at some stage this got cleaned up so it now looks like this:
So what we have now is Dominic’s original simple 3 settings - with David’s additional complexity set underneath.
So I am in the camp of those who think we should have two distinct tools here: a simple Click Track generator and a Percussion&Rhythm session generator. Koz suggests a Manual entry to guide folk to the new P&R generator from Click Track - but I would also suggest adding a link/divert to the “advanced” user who stumbles into the simple Click Track over to the P&R generator (as we know how few folk RTFM).
Another approach would be to retain a single generator showing by default the “simple” controls and hiding the more complex settings behind and “Advanced” button which could either pop up a fresh dialog or extend the existing one.
But I think my preference would be for two differen generators.
Peter
With Nyquist, we can’t do “bicycle in an aeroplane” - they have to be separate. Nor do I see how we can link from the simple one to the advanced one without using a significant number of words in the interface to do so.
Steve’s demo was a metronome track (tick, tick, tick, tick). So are we saying we are not going to release that, and have two Click Tracks, however called (tick, tock, tock, tock)?
We should remember that David Sky was trying to “improve” the 1.2 Click Track in response to user requests, which included making it sound more like a metronome (but he didn’t provide a way to soften the first click). So I suggest the advanced Click Track might provide that, unless the real-time metronome is likely to turn into a reality.
If we call the advanced one “Rhythm Track” it sounds a bit like a Drum Machine - but I thought we agreed we don’t have a good enough Nyquist interface for that.
If we can conjure up a good name for the simple Click Track, it still seems preferable to me to call the advanced one “Click Track”, unless it really is going to be very different to the existing 2.x Click Track. 1.2 is a long time ago now, and many users will never have used that version’s simple Click Track.
Or, call them both Click Track with some other word to distinguish them.
But designing the two is more important than the name right now.
Gale