As the years have gone by and my SSDs have filled up, I've come around to liking and preferring company-wide unified UI designs. Learn the ropes for product A, already be up to speed when product B is finished downloading.
From an artistic and design standpoint, I do admire slick and minimalist UI designs like the stuff from String Audio, but in some cases (like with my most recent purchase, Wave) I actually had to read the manual. The horror! But this shouldn't be needed. Why? Because, let's be real - a Kontakt library, any Kontakt library, is 90% a re-skin of the same handful of internal Kontakt fx modules like EQ, compression, reverb, etc. with perhaps some slick layer mixing, step sequencers, and stuff like that on top. The rest is 40-year-old sampler controls, like sample start point, velocity response curve, blah blah blah. Old hat. Even custom players like Sine, Spitfire, or Vienna are basically doing the same stuff for the most part.
So to me it feels like a bit of a waste of time to have to learn how to operate the same old, same old controls just because they've been re-skinned with a fancy new look. I actually breathe a small sigh of relief when I load up some cheap-n-cheerful Kontakt library that uses the Photosynthesis engine, because I know what it does and where to find the controls I want to grab, and I can just get down to work quickly without wondering if there's something amazing hiding behind an unfamiliar UI control. For a while there seemed to be a trend to try and make Kontakt libraries look like they could actually do more than the normal set of Kontakt fx modules, by creating uber-slick UI skins to give the illusion that something new was under the hood - which was never the case.
I'm pretty much long past the point of being inspired by the UI of a synth or library - I already know what I want to do, but where the hell is the filter envelope?!? Spitfire's EDNA engine in Kontakt still makes me groan when I load it up, but the consistency across many of their orchestral Kontakt libraries is a bit of a relief, even if the controls are microscopic on a 4k display. At lease you know at a glance what can be done and how to do it. (Just don't get me started on cyber-mechanical 3d background textures where elements look like they're clickable controls but are just part of the wallpaper....)
So I kind of like the direction that Spitfire (and others) are moving toward, which is a unified skin that can be applied to a variety of different sample content pools. I might not use HZ Strings for months (years?) at a time, but when I do it's no longer a mystery where the reverb depth control is.
If people don't like where the keyswitch controls or other stuff are in the Spitfire player, I understand. I never use key switches, so... whatever... but I get it. But I definitely understand and approve of the concept of moving toward a unified UI design. Unless the underlying engine is doing something totally radical that requires new methods of visualization and control - like granular-wavelet DNA-recombination tomfoolery - and is just a plain old sample player at heart, I actually prefer the unified UI approach.
Although I think I agree that I'd prefer conventional mute+solo switches on the Signals page of the Spitfire player...
Again mate I love and respect your work greatly but in response to this one.
Firstly we can't let our own experience and wisdom cloud our judgment when designing a
product for other people. Spitfire very intentionally targets new and upcoming composers. So while
we know roughly the ins and outs of how a sampler works, or general knowledge like how MIDI drums are usually laid out.....there is no guarantee that a new user will be able to work out how to even access all the content. We can't assume anything is easy to understand. The second you do someone could be confused and not like your product leading to bad word of mouth or they may miss whole aspects or features from your library that makes it unique and that you spent time on, again leaving them slightly disappointed. Whereas had you mad those elements obvious and encourage experimentation, your customer will have a better experience and be more likey to firstly purchase more from you but secondly become more invested themselves. It feels almost patronizing to type that out because its like Business 101, and I think that's why it frustraits me when I see it being dont by a team run by a marketing department. The
have to know this, which makes it feel like they just dont care.
So as a developer your attitude should never be 'they will figure it out, because I can' It should be 'How can I make sure all the cool stuff is obvious, even to those who dont even know, they dont know this feature exists as a thing'
(not putting words in your mouth, just using this as an example of general attitude developers can have)
You should be making all the options and features as obvious and apparent as possible. This a tool not an art installation. I dont mind the minimalist graphics per-se.... it's more the wasted space, the hidden menus, the unlabelled options, the lack of common sampler features, that lack of information on special mappings that some patches have, or an indication on which patches use the reverse feature without me having to check a separate window for every patch.
Again I know people keep going back to 'Just read the manual', which is missing my point. We know, just by the question being publically asked so many times, that not everyone reads the manual, even when they are confused. They just don't, it may seem illogical to you who does, but we know, based on peoples on admission that they do not. So you shouldn't then continue to act and operate under the assumption they do, because to you not doing so is illogical. You can't think for other people in this manner
(general statement not directed personally)
Your comment about not using HZ strings but when you do, because all the UI's are the same eventually you would figure out where the reverb was and upon coming back to HZ strings later you will now know where it is for that too.... this all assumes that customers keep investing after their first purchase. Like if someone buys this library and are underwhelmed with it, because either features that make it special were hidden off to the side or they didn't know were there, there is the possibility that they may not want to buy more, meaning they will never 'eventually find the reverb'. So would it not make more sense to make the user experience more seamless with features obvious to a
first time user....increasing the possibility they will keep investing? Nothing about the Spitfire UI encourages me to explore and investigate. And when you have competing products that
do make it easy to navigate and the sounds are comparable, minimalism seems a foolish soap box to stand on. Again these are tools, not art. I should never have to 'expore' or 'go on a curated adventure' to find the fucking reverb.
-DJ