[Rwp] OSARA keymap

[James Teh]

FWIW, I agree with most of this: single keys for common actions and 
reuse of the key with modifiers for... well... modifications of that 
concept. I personally find modifiers very quick to hit--much faster than 
hitting function keys. (In Sonar, set selection start and end are mapped 
to f9 and f10, and even after years of use, I still find this tedious on 
laptop keyboards, which are all I use these days.) However, I accept 
that others find modifiers as tedious as I do function keys. What I 
don't accept is that function keys are better than modified keys for 
mute, solo and arm. You can argue I'd "get use to it eventually", but I 
can equally argue the same for modified keys. There's also no easy way 
for a newcomer to remember this, which is very bad for such common 
actions. Unfortunately, that leaves us with changing the bindings for 
split, marker, etc.

Concerning compatibility, I am of course very keen to copy the best from 
ReaAccess; that just makes sense. However, I will not simply do 
something just because ReaAccess did it if there is a better way. One 
has to learn the best from the past, but one should also always seek to 
improve beyond it.

Thanks,
Jamie

On 23/02/2015 7:36 PM, Scott Chesworth via RWP wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> Functions to import and export keymaps already exists in Reaper, so
> that's good news for anyone who wants to maintain a separate map.
>
> I see a few things about these common functions requiring more than
> single keys that'd make usability clunky:
>
> First, I find it hard to imagine how some of the current power users
> would be able to work at the pace they've built up if they had to hold
> down modifiers before some common functions and not others. You could
> argue that they're power users, they can just maintain their own
> mappings, but bigger picture, are we not trying to find something
> agreeable to most to lessen the amount of questions that'd need to be
> asked when someone is having a problem, and also pave the way for
> newbies to become power users who can work at this speed in the
> future?
>
> Second, the concept of common functions being bound to single
> unmodified keys, then bringing in the modifiers to carry out more
> global commands such as to unmute all tracks or announce which tracks
> are current muted throughout the project seems pretty elegant here,
> can't really think why anyone would want to hold down three keys to
> mute something when they could just hit one, and the three key combo
> is bound to something that's related, but used less often throughout a
> session.
>
> Third, requiring a control surface to be able to work at a decent pace
> just isn't a good thing fullstop, especially not in a DAW like Reaper
> where the price and footprint is kept intentionally low. There are
> fairly cheap single strip surfaces etc, but having owned a few, I
> found them clunky and slow to use for anything beyond very specific
> tasks, and unless OSARA is different, the amount of speech feedback
> you get by default when using a surface is practically none. The
> latter doesn't bother me really as I come from a Pro Tools background
> where that's always been the case, but I've seen plenty of Sonar users
> go goggle-eyed over how little the computer talks to Tools users, so I
> don't think that'd be met well by most users.
>
> FWIW, I'd grudgingly give up on the crusade for function keys being
> involved if we moved Mute, Solo and Arm to M, S and A respectively,
> because it'd be another parallel between the Reaper and Pro Tools
> keymaps that'd make my life easier in the long run, but i'd bet losing
> their instinctive muscle memory for markers and splitting items would
> cause fits of rage in some of the more accomplished editors. IMHO, the
> more parallels between DAWs the better, and with Pro Tools still being
> something of an industry standard, that makes a lot of sense. Trouble
> is, Tools is a long way away from being widely used by screen reader
> users, so I doubt my opinion will be shared by most people.
>
> Sorry to disagree over pretty much everything :)
>
> Scott
>

-- 
James Teh
Email/MSN Messenger/Jabber: jamie at jantrid.net
Web site: http://www.jantrid.net/
Twitter: jcsteh