What I like about the floating row is that it’s very visually consistent – the highlighted keys on the octave page show you the absolute octave for every key, from 0 to 5 volts, no matter what. I think also being able to transpose down from the root is really handy when you start having some tracks octave-shifted from others, and I like that the floating row invites that interaction.
The main thing I didn’t like about it is that it takes up almost the whole page except for what’s left of the top row, which struck me as wasteful at first, but I’m coming around on it. I tried tuning my oscillators all the way down, cranking the octave select all the way up, and building a sequence using negative octave shifts only, and this is a lot of fun and different from how I’m habituated to working on melodies. I was worried about the CV outs not being able to go any higher when you’re at a +5 octave shift and go up a ways on the note page, but I’m still able to get the output to change at full note, alt note, and scale values, and cranked all the way it’s just barely left the range of my hearing. I also do a fair amount of sequencing where I’m not using Ansible’s CV outs directly but instead using KR.CV on Teletype to compute pitch CV for other sequences, and I’m excited about having the full voltage range available for this kind of application.
The +/- button pattern is a great idea for saving space. The center reset button could potentially use brightness to indicate the current octave? For octave shifting I do like the immediacy of having a dedicated button for each shift, so you can jump to an absolute octave as a performative gesture instead of having to scroll through intermediate octaves. It will also remember the setting for octaves that have gone off the screen, even though the values are clipped to 0-5, so you can “hide” some octave shifts and have the sequence be constrained to a single octave until you shift it up to “reveal” the octave changes that weren’t visible. I think having octave shift keys in a column that’s already in use would need some kind of modal interface, which complicates the implementation somewhat.
Using +/- buttons might be just the ticket for the ratcheting page. In the current release build when I first load a blank preset, the row above the navigation row has an animation for the current step, but if I turn on a trigger and then turn it back off the animation moves up a row, so it might not be intended to use the bottom row for anything. If not, maybe that row and the top row could be minus and plus keys per note, which are used to dial in the number of gates you want to subdivide that note into, and the keys in between would be gate toggles. This leaves room for up to 5 toggles, which could work out nicely for space savings because you can pack a 5 bit toggle vector + 3 bit subdivision count into a single byte. But at that point you’ve used up THAT whole page… It would also lose some of the immediacy of getting subdivided notes as soon as you turn on more gates, because you’d have to select both settings for each note.
Well! I sure wound up blathering on a while. I’m super excited to get some feedback on these features, lots of folks around here have been using Kria a whole lot longer than I have.
