RME announces app control for RME Adi-2 series

[Soniclife]

Somehow RME managed to make it MORE difficult to adjust volume in the app than with the little tiny knob. FFS. Skeuomorphism is not necessary! Knobs exist because we have fingers and can grab them and rotate them easily with our hands. Knobs rendered in graphical user interfaces are idiotic. It's the crappiest UI widget, but RME made theirs especially difficult to use, I can barely budge the thing.

Is it a tribute to UI disasters of old?

Interface Hall of Shame - QuickTime 4.0

An in-depth evaluation of the QuickTime 4.0 user interface.

hallofshame.gp.co.at

 

[Reddoc]

RME managed to make it MORE difficult to adjust volume in the app

Agree strongly- The rest of the app is great, but the knob is difficult
RME are a pretty responsive company- maybe they will change it

 

[amper42]

I guess our use case is very different. I love the ADI-2 app. It allows me easy access to every setting without leaving the couch. I'm able to control the ADI-2 software with Mac OS X screen sharing. In addition, the RME ADI-2 remote is my friend. I use it to change volumes, not the knob. In fact, I typically never actually touch the ADI-2 DAC FS except to power it on. I absolutely love it and have three of them for various rooms paired with RPi-4 Moode streamers. Can't recommend it enough. The "Loudness" controls offer more control than I had with any other product.

 

[LesterHiggins]

I guess our use case is very different. I love the ADI-2 app. It allows me easy access to every setting without leaving the couch. I'm able to control the ADI-2 software with Mac OS X screen sharing. In addition, the RME ADI-2 remote is my friend. I use it to change volumes, not the knob. In fact, I typically never actually touch the ADI-2 DAC FS except to power it on. I absolutely love it and have three of them for various rooms paired with RPi-4 Moode streamers. Can't recommend it enough. The "Loudness" controls offer more control than I had with any other product.

Sorry, when I said "app" I meant Mac desktop, I actually don't even know if they have an iOS or Android version because the thing sits a foot and a half away from me on my desk, but I would assume a touch-control knob is a lot easier than using a mouse.

 

[LesterHiggins]

Is it a tribute to UI disasters of old?

Interface Hall of Shame - QuickTime 4.0

An in-depth evaluation of the QuickTime 4.0 user interface.

hallofshame.gp.co.at

When it comes to bad skeuomorphism, Southwest Airlines' 1995 website is king

 

[LesterHiggins]

Agree strongly- The rest of the app is great, but the knob is difficult
RME are a pretty responsive company- maybe they will change it

OMG someone agreed with me on the internet! Holy moly, this is cause for celebration! THANK YOU!

 

[Antagron]

Agree strongly- The rest of the app is great, but the knob is difficult
RME are a pretty responsive company- maybe they will change it

Can’t you right click and enter a number directly?

 

[rcstevensonaz]

Can’t you right click and enter a number directly?

It is a graphical interface that should be intuitive to manipulate with a mouse. My experience is that the graphical knob is not intuitive to use... every time I try to use my mouse to twist the knob from, say the 10:00 to 2:00 position, it really doesn't seem to do that very well.

 

[minimalist]

IIRC, you can use the scroll wheel of the mouse while hovering over the button.

 

[rcstevensonaz]

IIRC, you can use the scroll wheel of the mouse while hovering over the button.

That is not intuitive.

Knobs are rotated clockwise / counterclockwise. The obvious action is to click the mouse and then “rotate the knob” by moving the mouse in an arc that matches the outer edge of the knob.

Sliders are scrolled up / down. That would be a far better visual interface choice by RME. The slider could even be superimposed over a lighter colored image of a knob so it clear that the volume action is drag up / down (or scroll wheel) on the slider, and not trying to spin the wheel.

 

[Keith_W]

Sliders take up more screen real estate than knobs. I don't have an ADI-2, so I don't know how well (or poorly) the knobs work. But I do have Totalmix. I don't use the knobs at all, I double click on the small number and type in what I want.

 

[Reddoc]

Can’t you right click and enter a number directly?

Yes, you can, but I would prefer an easy click and slide rather than use the keyboard.
Click and rotate is definitely finicky.
It's not a big deal, the app is terrific otherwise and this is a small complaint

 

[minimalist]

That is not intuitive.

Why should that not be intuitive?

You rotate the knob on the screen by rotating the physical device you are holding in your fingers (the scrollwheel).
-> similar actions

Why should that be less intuitive than grabbing something on the screen by pressing a mouse button?
-> at best in the widest sense similar actions

 

[LesterHiggins]

It is a graphical interface that should be intuitive to manipulate with a mouse. My experience is that the graphical knob is not intuitive to use... every time I try to use my mouse to twist the knob from, say the 10:00 to 2:00 position, it really doesn't seem to do that very well.

I've finally figured out that if I click and hold in the middle of a "knob" and then drag my mouse upwards vertically straight, the knob will turn clockwise/up and vice versa for the other direction. It works the entire time I'm moving the mouse even, actually mostly, while I'm outside the perimeter of the knob-shaped-UI-widget, even while my cursor has traveled beyond the perimeter of the app window itself. It's working well for me, although it's not intuitive at all and I think I just accidentally stumbled upon that technique. I worked for nearly 20 years in usability and am thoroughly enjoying the discussion here.

 

[danadam]

if I click and hold in the middle of a "knob" and then drag my mouse upwards vertically straight, the knob will turn clockwise/up and vice versa for the other direction.

I don't really use the app, but on Windows 11 you click (and hold) anywhere on the knob and:

• move the mouse in general top-right direction and this turns the knob clockwise,
• move the mouse in general bottom-left direction and this turns the knob counter-clockwise

Moving exactly along the diagonal makes the fastest turns, deviating from the diagonal makes slower turns. Something like:

Red is for clockwise, blue for counter-clockwise and color intensity for speed.

I haven't encountered many knob-like widgets but I think so far all of them worked that way.

 

[MC_RME]

Exactly. Intuitive or not, this is not rocket science to find out and done equally nearly everywhere for decades.

 

[MC_RME]

Yes, you can

No you can't. This feature is there for the EQ knobs, but not the big Volume one. It is much too dangerous there (typo - kaboom). See also included help for several options that have been added to prevent overload volume havoc.

 

[KSTR]

I'm also one of those people who cannot handle the way rotary knobs/dials are often implemented in GUI. The obvious and natural behavior would be: you grab (click) it with the mouse anywhere at/near its circumference and the make the same rotational move that you would do with your fingers.
But is implemented like it were a linear fader, how stupid is that? Would anyone accept it if a linear faded would have to be operated like a rotary knob? For sure, no. So why this botched usage concept for rotary controls?

My bigger grief, however, is that the GUI cannot be handled with the keyboard, let alone blindly. The expected behavior, as used in many other programs, is TAB and SHIFT-TAB to move the focus (which means the item which has the focus must highlight this in some way), then SPACE to switch a toggle or cycle through a list and CURSOR-UP/-DOWN to increment/decrement numerical parameters in reasonable steps (or use SHIFT as a modifier for a "fine" stepping).

 

[OHtaru]

The obvious and natural behavior would be: you grab (click) it with the mouse anywhere at/near its circumference and the make the same rotational move that you would do with your fingers.

This is intuitive but awkward. Rotating a three-dimensional, damped physical knob feels comfortable, but using a mouse cursor to "reproduce" the actual rotation on a 2D screen is not a pleasant experience. Using linear motion instead of rotation is a smoother operation for the mouse, and it brings better precision. So why not? I have gotten used to this kind of operation and don't feel any discomfort. If one day I encounter a GUI that forces users to actually rotate its knobs with the mouse, I will instead give a one-star. As for why knobs are used instead of faders, I think one factor is that they save space.

Edit:
This is an excellent example. When you click and hold the knob, the cursor changes to a bidirectional arrow, indicating that you need to move it up and down.

 

[OHtaru]

I find that Fabfilter does a great job in this aspect. It can adapt to your operations, whether it's linear movement or rotation.
Take a look at its help documentation. It's a textbook example of human factors design: