MixPad Display Adjustments

[JosParticipant]

[Second post about feature requests from our recent theatre production. 🙂 First one is is on Scene numbering changes.]

I really love MixPad, and the ability to pull, dress out, and then push up a whole show offline was invaluable. At the end of the day, I’d pull the show to my laptop and keep working on it in the evenings, and then push it back the next morning. Having the USB backups was great, too, and worked smooth as glass. I particularly appreciated the ability to pull a show backup and just copy it to a USB drive after editing on the laptop — I often didn’t need to push/pull through MixPad as I could just recall from the flash drive.

One thing I’d love to see in MixPad is support for higher screen resolutions. On the iPad, it’s good; on a laptop, it’s hilariously big: the fonts and buttons are huge, and it doesn’t scale down very well to support a larger screen. I could easily fit 32 channel strips onscreen, but even in SQ-7 emulation mode I’m limited to 16. That’s awkward but workable; the real issue is the I/O screen. On the ‘Input Channels’ section of the I/O screen, there’s no possible way to pinch-and-scroll to make the grid display all the input channels, and because scrolling is locked to scaling, there’s no way to just scroll down to access the bottom set of inputs. The practical result is that I can’t manage inputs for channels past about IP39 (e.g., the ST1/2/3 channels are completely hidden) even on a high-resolution laptop screen. I have to go manage those inputs on the board itself, because I just can’t reach them. If the top strip with the ‘Processing/Routing/Meters’ strip and the ‘Local/SLink/USB’ buttons took up less space (smaller fonts, e.g.), that would likely do the trick.

A second feature that would be handy in MixPad is the ability to show the soft buttons on the screen (independent of the channel-strip area, which is kind of an awkward interface for them). Just having the set of soft-buttons on the screen that match the mixer model (so, 8 soft buttons on the display for an SQ-5, etc.) would be fantastic; it would be really awesome if we could display all 16+ soft buttons on the MixPad display since that’s not limited by the physical hardware! Bonus points if we can actually relocate them on-screen, but even without that just having a strip on the display with the soft-buttons visible for toggling would be huge.

I’m guessing the above is due to MixPad being basically the same code on the laptop as the tablet version, but as tablets get bigger screens and higher resolution it would be nice to have this available there too. I think some of the above can also be accomplished in 3rd-party software like Mixing Station, but I really love the look and feel of MixPad and generally prefer using the native software where I can!

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