PIANO ROLL

[cefnfaes]

I have recently graduated to Logic X from Logic 9, and am very pleased with it. One problem though is causing me great difficulty, and that is the lack of contrast in the piano roll. I find the dark screen depressing, and use the bright one, but the contrast in both of these is very poor. You can see the piano keyboard down the left side, from top to bottom, but the grey and whitish bars that run horizontally are so similar in shade, that I have to hold the cursor on the note I am entering in order to be sure I have put it in the right place.  The vertical lines (bars and beats) are OK, but these horizontal ones are a nightmare !!

 

Am I right in finding that there is no solution to this ?  If there is no solution, how can Apple be approached with a begging email ? Surely other people must be having the same problem, or is my eyesight that Bad ?! (No rude answers please)

 

Cefnfaes

[kerochan]

Here you go

www.apple.com/feedback/logic-pro.html

[Plowman]

If you write, throw in a comment about the clueless choice of channel colors, just for Music Spirit and Plowman. 

 

Here's the difference between channels one and two: 

 

Wait, it gets even better. Note the commonality of tone between channels 13 and 14: 

 

But the ultimate crown waits to be bestowed on the striking homogeneity, yes, the vacuous choice of hues, indeed the Logic programmer's wholesale and sustained contempt for their pitiable users, who squint at 4 AM on a deadline in their dank studio, scanning their monitor for some spectral hint of discrepancy between two notes on channels 4 and 5: 

[0B02]

I have been sending feedback to Apple ever since LPX was introduced, asking them to reintroduce the user-defined colours from LP9. In particular I found the ability to have white, black and grey regions really useful for making demo or rough versions instantly distinguishable from the regions with colours.

 

Instead, in the colour chooser, Apple just added another line of hues which were virtually indistinguishable from those above. Personally I find only about 20% of the colours are actually usable.

[Plowman]

"Personally I find only about 20% of the colours are actually usable."

 

In part, this is because there is no reverse video in Main or Environment. When a given hue is too light, the white lettering that names the region (or in Environment, the text object) cannot be read for lack of contrast. I suspect the latest raft of color in 10.3.1 (the "Procol Harum Row," a whiter shade of pale) was offered grudgingly by the programmers to appease (though not satisfy) the "hue" and cry of Logic users who still pine for the pre-LPX Color Picker access. 

 

In the certain tutorial overview of 10.3.1, the author said of our new colors, "It's a step in the right direction." This diplomatic statement damns with faint praise.  

 

I can be less diplomatic: Logic programmers are, amid their genius, prone to lapses of sloppy thinking and an elitist unwillingness to admit an oversight, no matter the unison and frequency of the users' protest. Logic programmers have preserved their spirit of innovation but lost the spirit of excellence. The former needs imagination and determined coding prowess and genius; the latter, a little cleaning up after themselves.  The former show how smart they are; the latter, a simple respect for a remarkably loyal consumer base. 

 

Craftsmen say "God is in the details." The non-distinct colors of note channels in Piano Roll, the loss of black, grey and white in the present palette, the loss of Color Picker in Main, the loss of two simple numbers in MIDI Draw for the CC and CC channel, attaching a tremolo mark directly to a stem.... all details. Small indeed, but this is where excellence is found. 

 

Logic programmers, this version is three years old this month. Please, could you take a pause and double-back to fix these widely and repeatedly requested items, in a spirit of excellence?