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MIR Pro Instrument Groups (feature request)
Last post Sat, Aug 08 2020 by PaoloT, 9 replies.
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Posted on Thu, Sep 08 2016 09:24
by Talino
Joined on Sat, Jul 17 2010, Posts 260

Hello,

My MIR Pro orchestral template is starting to get really cluttered (cf. screenshot). The problem is that when you zoom in, the instrument icons are also magnified (instead of retaining their size), which makes clicking on the right icon very difficult. Also, adding my new 8 sordino violins (and soon a couple of dozen other players) to the venue becomes an exercise in clutter management. Couldn't there be an option to somehow group instruments for the hide/show function (instead of having to select all of them and option-hide)? Maybe the plugin could report a group (selected on its interface from within the DAW) to MIR, or maybe MIR could "auto-group" based on a naming pattern. Right now it's starting to get real messy...

Thanks.

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MASTER: Cubase Pro 10.0.20, iMac 27 2015 i7 4.0 (17,1) 24gb RAM, OS X 10.14.4, RME Fireface UC. SLAVE: Mac Pro 2009 Quad 2.66 (4,1), 28gb RAM, OS X 10.11.6, Vienna Ensemble Pro 7, samples on OWC Accelsior SSD.
Posted on Thu, Sep 08 2016 11:53
by Dietz
Joined on Tue, Aug 06 2002, Vienna / Europe, Posts 8332

Hi Talino,

thanks for your suggestion. Proper Groups are high on my own feature request list since ages. As a matter of fact, legacy Vienna MIR had them, but they have been abandoned when Vienna MIR developed to MIR Pro eventually (... some VSL software engineers considered them to be unnecessary ... *sigh*).

Funny enough, Vienna Ensemble Pro 6 introduced Groups again (at least to a certain degree), but not for MIR Pro. 

Thanks for your patience,

/Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library
Posted on Thu, Sep 08 2016 11:59
by Dietz
Joined on Tue, Aug 06 2002, Vienna / Europe, Posts 8332

PS: In VE Pro 5, you could at least use the somewhat clumsy "Selection Groups".

/Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library
Posted on Thu, Sep 08 2016 13:07
by Talino
Joined on Sat, Jul 17 2010, Posts 260

Thanks Dietz. Hope this will be added soon. At least keeping the icons the same size when zooming the venue shouldn't be difficult to implement IMHO. 

MASTER: Cubase Pro 10.0.20, iMac 27 2015 i7 4.0 (17,1) 24gb RAM, OS X 10.14.4, RME Fireface UC. SLAVE: Mac Pro 2009 Quad 2.66 (4,1), 28gb RAM, OS X 10.11.6, Vienna Ensemble Pro 7, samples on OWC Accelsior SSD.
Posted on Fri, Sep 09 2016 04:09
by kenneth.newby
Joined on Wed, Mar 19 2014, Posts 126

This is the single most frustrating feature, or lack thereof, that I've experienced with MIR.  The ability to design a configuration of instruments in the desired positions on the stage and then define them as a group with a single icon would be lovely.  The group could be as simple as a wrapper for all the settings of the enclosed intstruments.    Any overlapping of groups would not be that problematic because of the size and availability of areas to select on That alone would be powerful. But... giving a MIR group the same features the instrument icon provides would provide amazing flexibility to such a group.  Rotation and re-positioning of the group (be careful, some instruments in the group might fall off the stage and go mute while others remain sounding), group level, group eq..., 

But back to a simple first start... just being able to define and display a group graphically on the stage would allow an effective way to adjust sections on the stage in a manageable way.  I see this as a really important user experience design issue—it's an affordance the tool should provide that would make a big difference in terms of effective use of MIR for both the design and maintenance of ensemble layouts.  

Imagine working in any of today's professional media authoring environments without groups—Logic, Final Cut, Photoshop, Illustrator, for instance.  I just helped my daughter compose a digital collage in Photoshop the other day.  She had a family of birds (mother and three little ones) that we carefully designed with different sizes, rotations, and positions in relation to each other.  Then she decided she wanted the family to be somewhere else in the composition, appearing smaller and with a different overall rotation.  Without Photoshop's grouping function this would have been a huge hassle, having to adjust each element individually to it's new position.  We made a group out of the four birds and instead of four sets of translations, scales, and rotations—twelve operations—we had three.  The point being that the power of groups is a universal affordance to include in any digital design tool.

I came up against this in a big way when building templates in MIR for the Dimension Strings as individual players.  The stage becomes so cluttered with a thick forest of overlapping icons that it's very difficult to see where one section begins and another leaves off.  And trying to select a particular instrument by clicking on its icon becomes an excercise in frustration.  Of course one can select the instrument from channel list in the main Vienna Ensemble Pro main window, or the mixer—all good if you have the luxury of a multi-monitor display to lay out all these visual interfaces in one work-space. Working on my laptop this again becomes a nuisance, switching back and forth between windows in the interface when it would be so sweet to just click on a group and have a zoomed image of the instruments in the group laid out with icons sized so they don't overlap.

In short, I love MIR.  It's one of the loveliest interfaces I've ever worked with, except for this one design omission.  It negatively impacts the experience of flow, and the effectiveness flow enables, when working with complex templates.

Kenneth.

Posted on Fri, Sep 09 2016 07:25
by Talino
Joined on Sat, Jul 17 2010, Posts 260

I agree with everything you wrote. Like I wrote above, the idea of adding the 8 + 6 + 6 + 4 Dimension players to my already dense setup is not very encouraging.

If this ever gets implemented by VSL, here's a couple of other ideas:

  • Allow an icon to belong to more than one group (think of tagging or taxonomy). This way you could hide e.g. all brass, all Dimension Brass, only one row of players etc.
  • In the same way VIP patches are loaded on MIDI demand (by setting them to the disabled state first), MIR instruments could be enabled and displayed only when audio is present, and stay enabled until explicitly disabled again. This would allow using the same template, sound & room color for different compositions, while showing only the instruments playing in a specific piece. You don't need to see the entire orchestra all the time. Think of classical pieces where the choir or soloists sit down just to get out of the way... Personally I wouldn't mind if this resulted in a small audio glitch or muted note when the instrument is activated, it would be just like having the first note not playing when auto-enabling a cell in VIP.

Just my 2c.

MASTER: Cubase Pro 10.0.20, iMac 27 2015 i7 4.0 (17,1) 24gb RAM, OS X 10.14.4, RME Fireface UC. SLAVE: Mac Pro 2009 Quad 2.66 (4,1), 28gb RAM, OS X 10.11.6, Vienna Ensemble Pro 7, samples on OWC Accelsior SSD.
Posted on Sat, Aug 08 2020 09:34
by PaoloT
Joined on Tue, Dec 27 2016, Posts 1396

I bump this discussion, because I fear I can't find anything new on this side. And I would love to see these ideas implemented (not as a luxury, but a necessity).

Paolo

Posted on Sat, Aug 08 2020 10:21
by Dietz
Joined on Tue, Aug 06 2002, Vienna / Europe, Posts 8332

Groups are definitely high up on the list of features for the prospective update of MIR Pro.

/Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library
Posted on Sat, Aug 08 2020 12:57
by PaoloT
Joined on Tue, Dec 27 2016, Posts 1396

Dietz, great news!

Paolò

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