Acoustica 7.0.56: Questions about keyboard / mouse behaviour and customisation

[tonysawford]

Hello,

I've just started evaluating Acoustica after having been a long-time user of another audio editor, and so far I'm pretty impressed.

I do, however, have a couple of questions that relate to the ergonomics.

1) I'm used to using the mouse wheel to scroll through the audio document (in much the same way as you would scroll through a text document in a word processor), so when I forget which program I'm using and muscle memory kicks in, I find it a bit disconcerting that the scroll wheel increases or decreases the zoom factor. Is it possible to customise the behaviour of the mouse wheel so that it will - by default - scroll left or right, and will zoom in or out when used with some modifier (the shift key, for example)?

2) Is there a keyboard command - or could one be implemented - that toggles between play and pause? Again, my muscles are so used to the way in which The Other Program works that I instinctively find myself hitting space to pause playback, only to have the cursor jump back to the position from which playback started.

Thanks very much!

Tony

[stian]

Hello Tony,

I've just started evaluating Acoustica after having been a long-time user of another audio editor, and so far I'm pretty impressed.

Thanks, I'm glad to hear that!

1) I'm used to using the mouse wheel to scroll through the audio document (in much the same way as you would scroll through a text document in a word processor), so when I forget which program I'm using and muscle memory kicks in, I find it a bit disconcerting that the scroll wheel increases or decreases the zoom factor. Is it possible to customise the behaviour of the mouse wheel so that it will - by default - scroll left or right, and will zoom in or out when used with some modifier (the shift key, for example)?

We'll consider this, but it's a bit tricky to get this right. Currently, there are modifier keys for scrolling horizontally and vertically as well as for adding harmonics in the spectral editor. I guess it would be possible to optionally swap zooming and horizontal scrolling.

2) Is there a keyboard command - or could one be implemented - that toggles between play and pause? Again, my muscles are so used to the way in which The Other Program works that I instinctively find myself hitting space to pause playback, only to have the cursor jump back to the position from which playback started.?

There's the keyboard shortcut "P" to pause. You can customize the keyboard shortcuts in the preferences, but ideally, "P" would start playback again when press in paused mode. Unfortunately, that's currently not the case. This is something that we could easily implement. You could then simply use the shortcut editor to assign pause to the space bar instead of play.

Best,
Stian

[tonysawford]

Thanks, Stian - I shall continue my evaluation while trying to remember the correct keystrokes / mouse actions

I think that you're very likely to have a new user very soon...

Cheers,
Tony

[stian]

Thanks, Stian - I shall continue my evaluation while trying to remember the correct keystrokes / mouse actions

I think that you're very likely to have a new user very soon...

Thanks Tony, I'm glad to hear that!

Best,
Stian