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by tuvix13 hours ago |
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upvoteby thenthenthen1 minutes ago|
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Same, a Teenage Engineering VST =D
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upvoteby SwellJoe13 hours ago|
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Counterpoint: I hate VST GUIs. They're often skeuomorphic hell.

They love fiddly round knobs which are terrible to control with a mouse or touchpad, and are bad for accessibility. They also tend to have a bunch of mystery meat navigation because the historic hardware UIs they're emulating were forced to bury stuff behind menus due to limitations of the technology, and cost limitations, at the time. Some are better than others, but the priority is often looking cool in screenshots rather than being comprehensible and discoverable.

I don't mind shadows and shapes that look three dimensional; affordances that indicate what you can do with an interactive element is great and an improvement over the flat trend. But, VST GUIs are among the worst examples to copy. And, round knobs are probably never the right choice for a computer GUI.

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upvoteby tuvix13 hours ago|
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Haha yeah I think I’m mostly speaking from nostalgia. I do remember wrestling with knobs in Massive or whatever free VSTi back in the day was pretty terrible.

I can’t deny I love the look, though.

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upvoteby immmmmm11 hours ago|
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While I have a massive collection of VSTs I always end up using my very limited modular and Rytm mk1. And Elektron machines are an UI nightmare.
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upvoteby QuantumNomad_10 hours ago|
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> Reminds me of VST GUIs

I was thinking the same thing. And I was also thinking, now that Ableton Live has a JavaScript toolkit [1], maybe this Ambient CSS could be useful in that context.

I’m still on Ableton Live 11 so the Ableton Live Extensions SDK is not available for me. Therefore I cannot try this idea myself yet.

[1]: https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/introducing-extensions-sdk/

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upvoteby tuvix7 hours ago|
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From what I remember reading it was pretty limited and only applied to context menu actions.

I was pretty disappointed when I saw that, but they’ll probably expand it

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upvoteby QuantumNomad_7 hours ago|
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I was also unsure about that. A couple of YouTube videos I saw gave me the impression that it is possible to spawn a web view with your own HTML, JS and CSS. But without being able to try it out myself yet, I can’t really know if I understood correctly or not. But they did say that in terms of what you can do API wise it is very limited still indeed. But also that they are going to expand the capabilities of what you can do over time.

It being pretty limited is also part of the reason why I’ve not yet decided if I should pay for the upgrade from 11 to 12, or if I should wait it out until say Ableton Live 13 or 14 or 15 comes out.

I have the Suite version, so if I upgrade it will be a pretty expensive upgrade. Although, I did see that they also have a rent-to-own option to pay little by little over several months. And then there is also the possibility of discounts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which is only a couple of months away.

Also there is still a lot of content and capabilities in Ableton Live Suite 11 that I haven’t even made use of yet, including the full M4L that comes included with Suite. So even if I were to wait years before upgrading I wouldn’t run out of things to learn about the version I currently have anytime soon :)

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