It Works

I have behaved myself this week--after Monday, anyway.  As I've been doing for the last couple of weeks, I have been working on my program instead of practicing music like I should.  Hopefully that will change this next week, because I have the bugs worked out and it doesn't crash any more.  It's finally useful!  A couple years ago when my keyboard display stopped working, I bought a shareware program that does something to the one I've been writing.  Obviously I've decided to abandon the old one.  It doesn't work with my USB MIDI interface I use with the laptop (my home computer has a gameport MIDI interface it does work with).  But even if it did work, it was still designed poorly.  I'll explain further.  The problem with programming instruments on the keyboard directly has to do with the user interface.  The output from the keyboard is poor as it only has a 2x16 display, not much room for information (and in the case of my keyboard, it doesn't work at all).  The input is also poor as there is no qwerty keyboard or numeric keypad, meaning all numbers have to be entered with a slider or up/down arrow buttons.  Text is even worse since it requires scrolling through the alphabet for each letter using those same buttons.  Now, the creator of the program I was using did an okay job displaying all of the data on the computer screen.  But what he didn't do is make the data input any easier.  He made it easier to type in instrument names, but as far as editing parameter values, he still forces the user to click on the parameter and then click up and down arrows to change the value.  That's no easier than entering the data on the keyboard itself!  So, with my Excel program, data can be typed into the cell.  Also, I can get to different parameters (Excel cells) using the arrow keys, cut/paste a whole bunch of parameters, etc.  All these normal Excel features carry over in my program.  Sooo much faster to edit... especially on the fly during practice.