I can’t get my head around this; if I’m in the Block menu and change a parameter, but then decide I want to undo that change, the obvious thing to do is press the ‘Undo’ button. Yet when I do, the first thing that happens is it exits the Block menu and takes me straight back to the Grid - not very helpful, as I really want it to stay where I was so that on pressing the ‘Undo’ button I can see the change I made to the parameter revert to the previous state.
Anyone else bugged by this? Want to check it’s not me doing something wrong and if it’s something that seems to frustrate enough of you, I’ll make it a feature request to change this
I like ‘Undo’ functions that step back to whatever screen I was in before the last action. If that was the current screen, then remaining there is fine. Ideally, clicking ‘Undo’ should look like a video stepping backwards frame by frame, undoing clicks/actions and stepping back where necessary through whatever screens were traversed prior to the ‘Undo’.
The ‘Undo’ function can’t anticipate what your next move is, nor should it. It should roll backwards through clicks and screens in exactly the reverse order as they were navigated through forwards.
Are you saying then that you like the fact that the Undo function takes you back to the Grid, regardless of what action you are undoing?
For example, if I’m changing the gain of an amp block from 5.0 to 7.0, and then press ‘Undo’, I want the undo to return the gain to 5.0, with the Block menu still open in front of me. But instead what happens is the undo button takes me back to the Grid - which of course is not undoing the last action, which was to change the gain. The only way to ‘undo’ the changes I made to the gain is to press the ‘Undo’ button at least one more time and depending on whether I paused as I was originally changing the gain from 5.0 to 7.0 it will either take me straight back to 5.0 (the starting point) or to whatever number I paused on (for example 6.3) as I was making that original change; in which case I need to press the ‘Undo’ button a number of times depending on how many times I paused.
This seems incredibly counter-intuitive to me, and really frustrating. I would post a video to show all that I’ve described but I can’t seem to do that - are we able to upload videos here?
The way the controls in the QC mimic analog controls leads to some of this issue. Rotating a knob that represents a digital change to a setting technically means you are changing the setting in the smallest increment available for that setting, over and over again until you stop. Which one of those changes is the QC supposed to know you want to undo back to? It appears the software looks for a pause of a certain length as a commit, and registers it for an undo. Unless you want a commit button in place for every change you make so an undo knows where to go back to, the current undo solution in place already is likely the best you can expect.
Now an undo that you short press to try and undo only the setting that you are currently modifying, and a long press to cancel all changes in the current screen since it’s been open might be interesting to think about.
With the Helix you just press the knob in and it takes you back to the parameter setting that you started with (it doesn’t consider pauses on the way to the new value; so if the gain is at 5.0 and you change to to 7.0, by dialling the knob, then pressing it in takes you back to 5.0, regardless of whether you ‘paused’ on 5.7, 6.2 or whatever on the way)
You say ‘It appears the software looks for a pause of a certain length as a commit, and registers it for an undo’ but that’s not really the case, as pressing the ‘Undo’ takes you back to the Grid at all times, even if you’ve left the change of parameter in the Block menu in place for a while.
IMHO the QC is trying to be too clever if it’s trying to work out whether you want to return to the point at which you paused changing the parameter rather than just return it to where it started; again the Helix system works better here, because to restore each parameter to the start point you press in the specific knob that you were using to change that parameter, rather than have a ‘global’ undo function.
I like your idea of short press/long press though.
The pressing in of the helix knob is exactly what I meant by a “commit” button or action. Pressing in the knob registers a start position to go back to for its undo if I’m understanding you properly. I have never worked with the Helix so I may be misunderstanding. With the QC knobs also being foot switches, it would likely take an actual commit soft button in the interface to mimic that though.
Actually with the Helix you don’t press the knob to register the parameter BEFORE you make a change, you just press it after if you want to undo a change - and it reverts back to the previous ‘saved’ sate. At least that’s as I remember it, I did sell my Helix a while ago.
No reason why the press function of the footswitch in the QC couldn’t be used this way though?
Nope, definitely agree with you there, don’t want it going back to the grid every time.
It should back up as intelligently as possible within the context of a transaction, which is what I believe was what @Mophire was getting at when he mentioned “commit”. Transactions should be as granular as possible without getting ridiculous and tracking every minute knob/parameter change. Also, as he mentioned, with some changes that could potentially be time based, if for example, the parameter has many incremental values from 1 - 100 that may have been changed several times. A simpler setting, e.g., an On/Off parameter, could back up to the last setting. Another option is to revert to the value the preset/scene was last saved in.
I do agree that combining, for example, undoing a parameter value setting with automatically backing out to a different screen, such as the grid, is often less than ideal. Also, the ‘Undo/Redo’ button should be accessible somewhere on the screen in pretty much ANY screen while editing.