Manual is the reason I'm still debating the purchase

famusvictim

2013-01-27 06:38:14

My best piece of advice from a musician's standpoint is that the manual (without infringing on IP) could easily do a much better job in almost every respect, by showing applied examples for coding, perhaps even with hypothetical instruments/programs/controllers/etc. Creating "real" scenarios, where you indicate the components's MIDI signals/specs, MIDI flow, and Rules involved to make real life applications possible, would all make the "job" of learning MT less of a job, and more of an adventure into device integration. Show the code in a large variety of MIDI signal processing environments. I would like to see a manual that's at least twice as long.

I really want to buy MT, honestly, but because of the severe lack of tangible examples for coding, and the apparent assumption that every buyer is going to be versed in basic programming more than in music, in the manual, is making me wary of buying the product. This is even more frustrating because I know every function and parameter for all the outboard modules/units (5 units), every software program (2), all 3 MIDI controllers, and all the variables within all of these components that direct and effect the signal flow of my live/non-synth sounds sources (guitar, vox and a miced-vibraphone) that I want to control and coordinate to create the live/recording musical project I'm trying to build for professional purposes in the experimental scene. I know that MT has the capacity to do everything I want, but I don't want to embark on the learning curve, and spend hours in the forums, failing to find things, needing to write new posts, all because the manual lacks enough tangible coding examples of hypothetical situations to dramatically boost my learning rate.

--I know MT could coordinate and be the core of my new musical project and I want MT
--I know exactly what I want the program to do to my gear and software, and I know that it can in theory accomplish all of these tasks beautifully and elegantly.

...BUT, the manual is so incredibly poor at telling me how to go about doing this, that I am extraordinarily frustrated, because everything I need to create this awesome musical project has a learning curve that is severely steepened by the sparse manual that does a terrible job of teaching me how to use the product with almost no tangible examples of applied code.

Soooooo many more musicians, very young and very old, would buy this product were it simply made more accessible to them, because they would see just how powerful it can in real-life, with many well developed applied examples of MT's code integrating systems in the manual, and more real-life applications elucidated on the webpage.... I truly believe this.
:idea:
I am so adamant about this potential of MT as a incredibly powerful product that I will offer to help in any way I can to help Bome develop a more user friendly manual that would appeal to everyone from lighting techs, to DJs, to Looping Artists, to Stage Techs, to Guitar Techs, to Experimentalists like myself, to graphic artists, to pyrotechnicians... to any combination of any of these

Coding examples should be generated for "real life" situations for all of these. Perhaps users in the Bome community could be asked to pitch in more than just the small examples of code found in this forum, and pitch in their coding for full systems that they create, or at least examples of multiple coordinated "real life" functions of a system, and perhaps Bome could publish the most concrete of these coding examples with helpful notes, either in the manual or in a supplemental Addendum to the manual as a separate downloadable PDF???
The manual should veer away from this purely technical standpoint, to show the world the power of midi, and especially when Bome's MT is at the helm of any MIDI system.

I apologize for the length and adamancy of this post, but I've been spending 10 hours a day putting this new project together, and when I recently got to MT, I hit a brick wall suddenly, and I did not expect that given my background and experience.

famusvictim

2013-01-27 17:09:26

Please allow me to be more specific.
I am hoping that Bome can publish a new manual or an Supplemental Addendum that has examples like this:

"Jimmy wants X device to perform function A, and Y device to perform functions B and C, when he presses a CC button (Q) on his MIDI controller (Z). Jimmy also wants the same button (Q) to make his software sequencer (R) begin playing, and simultaneously, he wants Device X to respond to the MIDI clock signals of the sequencer (R) by using that MIDI signal for setting the tap tempo function of the X device. Here is the implementation information for his three devices, and then here is the code he would need to write to accomplish this coordinated task: ...."

BTW - I'm going to buy MT, likely today, but I hope that other musicians, and professionals in other fields, will have better literature to reduce their learning curve and allow them faster access to the power of MT than I will get.