MIDI Editor Horizontal Zoom - whyyyy is this possible?

[ferropop]

What is the possible use case of allowing this to happen?



It's horrifying lol.

[ivansc]

Agreed. One of Reaper`s few MIDI weak spots has long been the clumsy way(s) to access MIDI tracks, especially in the editors.

However, I admit that when I am transposing or modulating a track, it IS handy to be able to shrink it down quickly to envelope select all the data you want to affect....
I am in the middle of re-keying a lot of my old MIDI backing tracks for an upcoming solo gig, because I can`t sing as high as I did ten years ago... last time I did a MIDI-based solo gig!

[ferropop]

Originally Posted by ivansc

Agreed. One of Reaper`s few MIDI weak spots has long been the clumsy way(s) to access MIDI tracks, especially in the editors.

However, I admit that when I am transposing or modulating a track, it IS handy to be able to shrink it down quickly to envelope select all the data you want to affect....
I am in the middle of re-keying a lot of my old MIDI backing tracks for an upcoming solo gig, because I can`t sing as high as I did ten years ago... last time I did a MIDI-based solo gig!

Haha yeah it just really shouldn't be the default behaviour imo.

[ivansc]

It really isn`t a default behaviour, it`s just The Behaviour.

P.S. I am currently working on about 300 MIDI files in exactly the way I said originally!!! Love that I can quickly minimise individual MIDI tracks in the TCP.

[vitalker]

It drives me crazy, too.

[mccrabney]

zooming in REAPER (also in arrange):



i'd like to be more like the guy in the middle. no more criss cross

...crisscrosscrisscross

[Denys]

Have you tried to change to use the playhead rather than the cursor for horizontal zoom? I don't remember where I changed that (classic problem with Reaper: was it a mouse modifier or a toggle in the actions?) but it works quite well here.

By the way, are you zooming/dezooming with a trackpad or a mouse? I think I get something similar with my Logitech Mouse (MX Master 2D), but I wonder if it's Reaper or the mouse.

[mccrabney]

^ the pingponging is about where "project start" begins, not whether the cursor zooms on edit or play cursor.



forgive the choppiness of the resized gif here, but this is what happens if you don't pad the beginning of your project with 20 or so minutes of dead space

there are a few workflow/usability issues here:

1) zoom center changes depending on project bounds, resulting in the pingponging of a user's eyes when zooming out to project-overview zoom level. improved behavior would be for REAPER's zoom center to always say in screen center, padding the project beginning with empty space rather than shifting the display of the entire project to the left.

compare the image above to the image below, which is a much smoother experience with no seasickness. to achieve this, i padded the project with a long empty space in the beginning of the project: ferropop knows what's up here



however, even though it's an improvement, this image showcases the 2nd issue, which is that:

2) zoom center should be screen center, instead of arrange center. currently, zoom centers on the middle of the Arrange panel, discounting the offset of TCP. this means that a user's head/eyes are always cocked a little to the right, offcenter. this minor angle isn't insignificant over long work sessions - it would be more comfortable to focus on screen center, rather than an inch or two to the right.

[ferropop]

Originally Posted by mccrabney

^ the pingponging is about where "project start" begins, not whether the cursor zooms on edit or play cursor.



forgive the choppiness of the resized gif here, but this is what happens if you don't pad the beginning of your project with 20 or so minutes of dead space

there are a few workflow/usability issues here:

1) zoom center changes depending on project bounds, resulting in the pingponging of a user's eyes when zooming out to project-overview zoom level. improved behavior would be for REAPER's zoom center to always say in screen center, padding the project beginning with empty space rather than shifting the display of the entire project to the left.

compare the image above to the image below, which is a much smoother experience with no seasickness. to achieve this, i padded the project with a long empty space in the beginning of the project: ferropop knows what's up here



however, even though it's an improvement, this image showcases the 2nd issue, which is that:

2) zoom center should be screen center, instead of arrange center. currently, zoom centers on the middle of the Arrange panel, discounting the offset of TCP. this means that a user's head/eyes are always cocked a little to the right, offcenter. this minor angle isn't insignificant over long work sessions - it would be more comfortable to focus on screen center, rather than an inch or two to the right.

McCrabney thank you for demonstrating this so clearly. This has perplexed me since 2009, I just sort of don't understand how this has survived a decade and a half.

[ferropop]

Again, a million discussions about the devs' process etc, but it's hard to ignore that something like this would have been squashed in 2007 within minutes if there was some dedicated discussion to workflow / user experience.

Can you imagine having to pad 20 minutes of silence in another DAW, just to have half-reasonable non-insane project navigation?

With nothing but respect, always...just this is clearly a "love is blind" situation where we tend to accept really crazy flaws in our favourite DAW because that's just how it's always been.

[vitalker]

ferropop, so true

[ferropop]

In case this helps anyone, I created custom actions (mapped to Z and X)
to give this awesome behaviour:







Basically zooms in/out to wherever your mouse is. It's extremely smooth (not choppy like in the GIF haha) and is my fundamental mode of navigation now. You look at something, you wanna get closer to it - hit Z a few times with your mouse near it. Zoom back out (in a non-insane way) by hitting X a few times.

===note=== the last line in both actions should match your desired default zoom setting!

[5ynth3t1k]

This issue is driving me *insert word here* nuts.

and the midi edit opening the midi part where you click issue.

They suck the life out of me. !!!!!

[5ynth3t1k]

How do I make reaper do this? What do I need ? Can I DL it. heck I'm in. : - 0

[mccrabney]

bump, i was working on an old project that didn't have the time-padding necessary to fix the left-zoom and it made me seasick. sad to think that this is default behavior.

[norbury brook]

Glad I found this thread. I thought it was me, this drives me bonkers and I keep thinking I've changed my zoom prefs or something.

Making edit cursor or mouse cursor the zoom center , as you say doesn't solve this.


Big +110000000000000000000 from me to sort this.


M

[NAD]

Originally Posted by ferropop

What is the possible use case of allowing this to happen?
[demonstration gif]
It's horrifying lol.

I'm not sure I understand. Is the problem that you can zoom in the midi editor to sections of the project such that no midi items are visible? And if so what would your expected behavior be?

[ferropop]

Originally Posted by NAD

I'm not sure I understand. Is the problem that you can zoom in the midi editor to sections of the project such that no midi items are visible? And if so what would your expected behavior be?

That a default behaviour (being able to zoom into the nucleus of an atom, to the infinite empty right-side of your entire project) is maybe bad default behaviour. That maybe it shouldn't be so easy to do an unbelievably useless and disruptive thing, to the point that it commonly happens during routine navigation.

It's just kinda bad, so clunky and unrefined in actual practice, not just aesthetically.

[StefanMax]

Originally Posted by ferropop

That a default behaviour (being able to zoom into the nucleus of an atom, to the infinite empty right-side of your entire project) is maybe bad default behaviour. That maybe it shouldn't be so easy to do an unbelievably useless and disruptive thing, to the point that it commonly happens during routine navigation.

It's just kinda bad, so clunky and unrefined in actual practice, not just aesthetically.

Not sure if I understand your point...

So basically what you want is Reaper to automatically create empty space left of the starting point (1.0.0) when you zoom out more than the whole project has items?

[ferropop]

Like, you can't add new MIDI Items from the MIDI Editor at measure 22,000 even if you wanted to for some reason, so there's literally no utility to being able to zoom that far. So rather than zoom over to measure 22,000 for literally no reason, it could just stop at the edge of the item (if that's what's editable), or stop at the edge of the last item in the project, etc. Something useful and sensible.

[vdubreeze]

+1 x a billion

[bFooz]

Bump.

[skylar_battles]

+1 and it’s the same in arrange view as well

[boolin]

possibly of interest to those following this thread...

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=238851

[strachupl]

You can see what is happening on beat 2000 with 3-4 simple mousescrolls. Isn't that powerfull?

[ferropop]

Originally Posted by strachupl

You can see what is happening on beat 2000 with 3-4 simple mousescrolls. Isn't that powerfull?

hahah this sent me

[inthevoid]

Huge +1 to this! As ferropop said, would be great to have the zoom capped to either the end of the MIDI item/selected MIDI items or the last item in the project. It's disorienting zooming out and it just keeps going... and going

[strachupl]

I saw some zooming changes in developer's pre-release but I wasn't able to test them. Maybe it is time to give devs some feedback and try it out or even suggest some things.

It is here - https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=276542

[ferropop]

I'm truly curious what the idea is here. 14 years into using Reaper as my daily DAW - I'm still not fully used to this.



Like even with great effort and deep thought, I can't quite believe or understand what is happening here, and what the objective is. One of the most excruciatingly frustrating things about navigating around in Reaper.

[ferropop]

^^ like when it slams the entire view to the right side of the screen, what is happening?

[Stevie Boy]

Curious, wonder if tis a settings thing?

Never seen this in all the years I've used reaper but you'll bet I'll probably come cross it now.

[ferropop]

Originally Posted by Stevie Boy

Curious, wonder if tis a settings thing?

Never seen this in all the years I've used reaper but you'll bet I'll probably come cross it now.

Oh wow, it's the only behaviour I've ever known from day 1.

I thought it was odd then, and here we are.

[Stevie Boy]

Hah yeah, I could replicate it and it did what yours does in your LICEcap, but only seemed to happen if I go nuts with the mousewheel once in the midi editor. I'm used to using arrow keys to navigate/zoom to content/ shortcuts when I'm in the Midi Editor, so its probably why I haven't come across it.

Also I tend to work a bit pattern based and usually don't stray far. Had a look and remembered that I tend to open each midi item with the doubleclick default action "MIDI: open in editor, subprojects: Open Project, Audio: Show media item properties" which zooms back to the content by double clicking the top of the midi item I'm working on if I get a bit lost in any particular pattern.

I do remember a time the MIDI editor never seemed to remember where you were vertically, THAT used to drive me nuts lol.


That said, I couldn’t for the life of me get my arrange screen to do what yours is doing there. Mine just zooms horizontally (ctrl+mousewheel) in to wherever I drop the edit cursor, goes in as far as I need (eventually becoming focused on the centre of the screen) and then I zoom back out again until have all I need in view?

Maybe I’m missing something lol.

[deeb]

Many of the zooms are glitchy: in project view and midi editor both horizontal and vertical.

The common thing is: it removed the focus from where we want to focus on, so that after zooming we need to find where we were focusing before. Hope all of them change soon. It’s super annoying and pain to use.

Feature zoom exists == true, but does it work right? No
It’s like an invisible annoyance we tend to not know it’s annoying but silently giving us struggles and h

This should be definitely a priority to be solved IMO.

[inthevoid]

Just spent a couple of days on a really MIDI heavy mockup and came back to this thread... Really hope this can be fixed soon. Just makes everything slightly more difficult and jarring when spending any length of time in the midi editor.

[Stevie Boy]

Yeah, I think I notice this less in the arrange cause I have item props/track manager/project bay and the action list docked to the right of my main screen there as well.

I did have to intentionally scroll the scrollwheel to zoom out past the size of my project to see the wide expanse to the right but its there, I could get to about 19 scrolls with things docked before I could drop the edit cursor at bar 112641.1.0!

I have to say, I've never felt the need to stray into the wilderness there before, so make of that what you will.

I also have a refresh (f5) button macro that gets me back to a full project zoom, as I'm often lost, but that's more down to me being me.

Maybe I've been un(sub)consciously working around this for years lol.

It's going to bother me now isn't it

[Juan D'Fall]

I don't know if this is of any help but.. In Preferences/editing behaviour I have 'horizontal zoom centre' set to 'Mouse cursor'. This makes the horizontal zoom centre wherever the mouse is pointing. This setting also carries over to the midi editor.
Jim

[deeb]

Originally Posted by Juan D'Fall

I don't know if this is of any help but.. In Preferences/editing behaviour I have 'horizontal zoom centre' set to 'Mouse cursor'. This makes the horizontal zoom centre wherever the mouse is pointing. This setting also carries over to the midi editor.
Jim

this does not happen to me - the time changes very slightly , just the enough to give problems when doing deep zoom.

in Tcp this also happens: mouse cursor on a TCP track, zoom up or down, and the track you had mouse over is probably very quicky somewhere else and out of view.

[Coachz]

Originally Posted by ferropop

In case this helps anyone, I created custom actions (mapped to Z and X)
to give this awesome behaviour:







Basically zooms in/out to wherever your mouse is. It's extremely smooth (not choppy like in the GIF haha) and is my fundamental mode of navigation now. You look at something, you wanna get closer to it - hit Z a few times with your mouse near it. Zoom back out (in a non-insane way) by hitting X a few times.

===note=== the last line in both actions should match your desired default zoom setting!

Is there a way to zoom in and out with this using the mousewheel ?

[ferropop]

I think there are some scripting hacks that let you sandwich actions between some code, and those actions will respond to mousewheel. Let me see if I can find them!

I'm glad you took to these GIFs, they didn't get much attention but it's exclusively how I navigate big projects!