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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

The volume controls in Tuxguitar are legitimately worse than some posted here. To adjust the volume of a track, you choose "View > Show Instruments" and then the unlabeled first circle in each row is the volume "knob". It's a "knob" because it is basically a circle with a dot with the 6-o'clock position indicating 0 and the 3 o'clock position indicating maximum. To adjust it, you click and hold (with no visual feedback that you have clicked anything active) and then drag up and down. Not side-to-side or in a circle, up and down.

I'm sorry to whoever designed this control for this very useful Free OSS. But goddamn that is bad.

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Circular knobs in audio contexts that don't support circular mouse movement need to not exist. If you want to have the user drag their mouse up and down, just use a vertical slider.

Back in the kde 3 days, there was this applet called "knob" for volume control. For me personally, its circular knob UI is actually the best.

Firstly, you can place the applet at a corner of the panel, e.g. at the bottom right, such that you now have an infinitely large target [1] to hit.

Then, once you have the mouse pointer hovering above it, you can:

- scroll up/down to increase/decrease the volume

- middle click to toggle on/off the sound

For those who possess precise control of the mouse pointer, of course they can still click on an arbitrary spot on the knob to set the volume.

For bonus point, because it is a knob, you always know what is the current volume level. All that for maybe 40x40 pixels of screen real estate only.

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/fitts-law-and-infinite-width/

And for those of us on laptops with no mousewheel abs no middle button? Trying to make the mouse move in an arc …

Knobs are great in the physical world, never met one on a screen that wasn’t hard to use.

On laptop, supposedly the simplest thing to do is to use the dedicated volume keys?

Again, this was back in kde 3 days, where desktop usage was more prominent than laptop, and even on laptop, a mouse with a scroll wheel was still a common accessory since touchpad gesture wasn't really a thing yet.

> Knobs are great in the physical world, never met one on a screen that wasn’t hard to use.

Well, I just gave you a perfect example where a knob on the screen was immensely useful. Of course it will be silly to try copying the physical world as-is, but with a little bit of creativity, applied in the right context, a knob on the screen can absolutely be useful.

It comes down to space, a knob can represent more points than a slider for less screen space

Yeah but sometimes that same knob correllates with a knob on an actual piece of hardware, so maybe the design compromise was this instead of changing the UI on the fly

That's commonplace in audio production programs/plugins actually.

It is, and it kind of sucks. Worse yet: in different VST plugins, for instance, sometimes you're supposed to click the knob and drag up and down, sometimes you're supposed to move the mouse in a circle as if you were rotating the knob.

Yep,every VST seems to be a learning exercise. But the variety of layouts and colours can also be inspiring. That said, the most garish were rarely keepers.

Was going to say. It saves screen space - should you need to save screen space - while allowing fine control. A slider would take much more screen area.

This is a bigger issue on synth VSTs that have tens or hundreds of controls. When screen resolutions were smaller it was a toss-up between hybrid vertical/rotational scrolling, horizontal/vertical window scrollbars to get the controls to appear at all, and multipage UIs.

Some designs, like Korg's MS20 VST, had all of the above.

You could keep the vertical "out-of-box" dragging but use a little vertical bar to show the current level.

Humans are terrible at reading angles quickly.

Humans may be terrible at reading pie charts quickly, but I think we do fine with visualizations such as clocks, gauges and circular controls. I wouldn't even be surprised if a circular gauge can be read more quickly or with less attention than a linear one (size/area being equal).

When staring at a mixer with 60 or more knobs you can see the difference in reading speed very quickly:

◐◑◒◓◐◐◒◒◓◐◓◓◐◐◑◐◒◓◓◐◐◑◒◓

(oops, HN is not showing the unicode rectangles but you can imagine that they look like a barchart and you can easily spot the highest and lowest)

It's to replicate audio disks - missing the opportunity that a different interface requires different interaction mechanisms.

I don't know, I've used these and I think they're actually kind of ingenious. Perhaps not the most intuitive thing, but once you understand how it works, it's pretty easy to use, and having the entire vertical area you can move your mouse for granularity is probably superior to moving a circle back and forth on a tiny bar.

I imagine this was originally implemented just because they wanted the UI to be a 1-to-1 matching of a soundboard, but it actually has the advantage of what I mentioned (granularity), as well as being able to display the level within a circle, AND you can fit a ton of them on screen without taking up much space. They're actually very functional.

dragging UI knobs up and down (like a slider) is the standard though and anything that makes me drag it in a circle is infuriating because of how hard to control it is.

Yes, sliders are better, but if all the controls that should be sliders were sliders then I'd have so many I couldn't see shit. I agree that it's bad to not label controls and hide volume of all things behind a checkbox in a menu.

So yeah, it's not ideal, but that's actually the least worst way for it to work.

I'm not usually a fan of capital punishment, but whoever said "no, it needs to look like a real instrument knob" is on track to change my stance there.

If it's FOSS maybe you can make a feature request to the creator?

Moving a round volume control in a circle would be even worse.

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