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Comment by StopDisinfo910

2 days ago

There is absolutely no way you successfully adjust two knobs at the same time on a multitouch display, let alone while doing live music. They are barely usable one by one.

There is a reason people serious about doing music keep using physical knobs to change values in their software. I’m entirely convinced the sole reason DAWs use virtual knobs despite them being such a poor UX element is because people will map them to MIDI knobs anyway and that keeps the software and physical world looking the same.

> There is absolutely no way you successfully adjust two knobs at the same time on a multitouch display, let alone while doing live music

I do it all the time on an iPad. It handles up to 5 simultaneous controls very well.

  • There's a demo app for the original iPad multitouch display, which can distinguish eleven simultaneous inputs.

    Prompting the obvious question: Why eleven?

    • You don't ever use your nose as an additional input device? I thought everyone did that.

Kind of a self fulfilling prophecy then. I had to figure out how to map the knobs to MIDI hardware because it was so hard to adjust them on screen!

At that point I guess the physical resemblance is a virtue.