Recent Posts

21

General Chatter / Re: Future of tracker music

« Last post by Saga Musix on September 21, 2020, 21:36:51 »

It has been asserted before that your opinion on the tracker scene is completely baseless and there are countless counter-examples. Yes, you will find users making dark music using all kinds of software. It's only your personal perception that people in the tracking exclusively make "dark" or "satanic" music and that noone else outside of the scene does that.

If you think we are all just a bunch of satanists, can you please just leave us alone and stop re-registering to the forum to re-assert this nonsense? And while you are at it, please stop judging our forum users by their name, thank you.

22

General Chatter / Re: Future of tracker music

« Last post by Soundman on September 21, 2020, 21:28:25 »

Hello, I would like to add to this discussion, I believe that some reasons why most musically talented people don't use trackers is because 1. Composers might prefer scoring software like Musescore or a Daw like Cakewalk by Bandlab, both of which are free and very powerful, 2. Because Mod tracking software is attached to a subculture that at times seems to be dark and evil looking, especially when people use names like "Dark Virus" or something like that, it doesn't exactly appear very friendly or normal, quite the opposite, it looks demented, dark and evil. I first found Amiga mod music in the early 90's like 1993/94 and some of the songs I found had the word "demon" in the name or "hell" or "satan", this makes mod tracker people look demented and twisted and normal people ie. non-satanic people find those kind of things very undesirable and even scary. The Amiga Mod Tracker community has painted themselves as being satanic because of the song names and forum user names they choose to use (and I'm not just talking about this forum, but also other Amiga mod music sites and tracker sites). Daws like Cakewalk by Bandlab and Pro Tools on the other hand are used by most musicians and probably Cakewalk is used even more these days because it is now free, there is also Musescore 3, Tux Guitar and Audacity.

23

Help and Questions / Re: channel management

« Last post by Saga Musix on September 21, 2020, 21:26:56 »

Yeah, that might work. I will probably just try both since the actual complicated code will the same, anyway.

24

Help and Questions / Re: channel management

« Last post by musicalman on September 21, 2020, 19:02:23 »

Thanks, I will test the channel names later today.
Making a shortcut in the pattern editor to move channels left/right would be considerably better than nothing, so I'd say go for it if you want.
Another idea: a move channel dialog of some sort where you can change the currently selected channel number by performing a swap. For example the selected channel is 5, and you go to the move channel dialog and enter 3. This would swap the two channels. But... I could see this falling apart with multi-channel selections. I don't use them much yet, but I know they are possible at least to an extent.

25

Help and Questions / Re: channel management

« Last post by Saga Musix on September 21, 2020, 16:48:26 »

Yes, the possibility of speaking channel name would help a lot!

I have now added a new variable, %channel_name%, which can be used in the pattern accessibility string. If the channel has a name, it will announce the index and name (e.g. "1: Bass"), otherwise it will just contain the index. Let me know if this works as intended. Test builds for both OpenMPT 1.30 and 1.29 should be up soon at https://builds.openmpt.org/builds/ (r13629 or later).

26

Help and Questions / Re: channel management

« Last post by Saga Musix on September 21, 2020, 15:45:40 »

The unique difficulties here are that the channel manager, unlike other dialogs, is completely custom-drawn so its logical controls are not exposed to accessibility tools. It's also not simple to replace those custom-drawn buttons with regular buttons because they also have very custom behaviour. In the long term, it should be possible to somehow expose them to accessibility APIs but it will be a lot of work. It's definitely something I want to see happening, but as always - development resources are limited.

27

Help and Questions / Re: channel management

« Last post by A11CF0 on September 21, 2020, 15:04:11 »

Is it possible to make the channel manager view keyboard-focusable and to provide shortcuts and accessibility events like in the order list? What are some of the unique difficulties in this special case?

28

Help and Questions / Re: channel management

« Last post by Saga Musix on September 21, 2020, 11:50:35 »

Okay, I will take care of that later today.
I also just had an idea to make channel rearranging at least a bit more accessible: Would it be helpful for you if there were two shortcuts in the pattern editor for moving the channel in which the edit cursor resides to the left and right?

29

Help and Questions / Re: channel management

« Last post by musicalman on September 21, 2020, 09:11:17 »

Yes, the possibility of speaking channel name would help a lot!
I see what you mean in the channel manager. I looked at it and while the tabs and buttons seem fine, there is no way to see channels or tell which are selected/enabled.

30

Help and Questions / Re: channel management

« Last post by Saga Musix on September 21, 2020, 07:52:31 »

First, is there an easy way to reorder channels?

I'm afraid there is currently no accessible way to do this - in fact there are even two way to do it but both go through drag&drop in custom-drawn UIs (pattern editor and channel manager). The complete lack of accessibility in the channel manager has been bothering me for a long time but I'm not really sure how to address it.

Secondly, from my experience as a screen reader user, it is not possible to see the name of the channel you're focused on in the pattern editor

Would it maybe help if I added the possibility to read out the channel name (in addition to channel index) to the accessibility description of the pattern editor?