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User-Friendly GLO Import procedure

Discussion in 'Feature Suggestions' started by ashtangakasha, 21/10/06.

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  1. ashtangakasha

    ashtangakasha NI Product Owner

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    The File / Import .glo bank... procedure is very confusing and labor-intensive.

    The destination dialog is unlabeled, so the user has no idea what it's for. Once it's understood that it's for specifying a destination, there is no indication of what might be a wise choice. Also, the destination dialog always positions itself at the Program Files folder, which is a very bad choice for the destination, and also forces the user to navigate to his chosen destination for EVERY bank that is imported. This is very tedious...

    A more useful approach would be a simple dialog with a MRU (Most Recently Used) dropdown list for SOURCE and another MRU dropdown for DESTINATION. You could pick from the dropdown, or click the associated BROWSE button to get a standard FILE OPEN dialog. Once the SOURCE folder is selected, this would automatically populate a listbox with all the GLO files found there.

    It would of course be very helpful to be able to select more than one GLO in the listbox (assuming you want them all to go to the same destination).

    For clarity, a greyed listbox could display the contents of the DESTINATION folder.

    Since this is a custom dialog, it would also be easy to include a few helpful bits of relevant info -- like the current topmost folder currently used for patches (this would naturally be the default for a session's first DESTINATION field), and perhaps a few words of patch management advice to the new user.

    Although Ab4 allows plenty of flexibility in deciding where to stash all your custom patches, and all your downloaded "banks," I think the convention should be to default to a sensible approach so the user doesn't have to learn the underlying file organization logic. If he wants to get fancy, he can add folders and search paths. Or perhaps he should merge downloaded patches into the main database? Or make subfolders of the main db folder...

    I love flexibility, but it feels a little counter-intuitive, especially if you don't spend much time digging into how Ab4 handles multiple locations. (For example, if I add a folder to the search path, it shows up in File Browser under Absynth 4. But if I make a subdir of the default location for the factory patches, it shows up in File Browser under My Sounds.

    I realize much of this is explained in the manual, but this kind of housekeeping activity should really be self-explanatory.

    Thanks,

    ac
     
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