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Mastering VAST

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Design & Philosophy

The overriding objectives I had when I created VP are simple to understand (if not always simple to achieve):

1. Make VP interact in real-time with the machine so that changes could be auditioned immediately during the creative process.
2. Make VP cross-platform so that it could run on the widest set of machines, particularly the PC (Windows) and the Mac.
3. Make VP relatively simple to maintain and accommodate changes in the Kurzweil VAST OS's.
4. Make VP responsive.
5. Try not to reinvent what the current interface does quite well.

Make it easy to learn

Of all the approaches that I considered, I chose to write VP so that it used the same interface we humans use; thus VP is also using the visual interface as a programmatic interface. The overriding reason was to get the real-time feel of being able to audition sounds during the creative process just like you can do on the real interface. A pleasant side effect of this is a friendly learning curve; if you are familiar with the real interface (which I assume you are), then learning the new one should be a snap. Moreover, you can switch between the two in the same editing session without losing a beat.

Make it easy to get around and to see what is going on

One of the overriding design factors was to be able to quickly move around all of the information in an object (especially Programs). I wanted to be able to "see" what was going on. Like pages in a book I wanted to be able to turn back & forth at the click of a button and change the data with equal ease. If I have, for example, an LFO, I wanted to be able to quickly see where it is being used with the hope of understanding its role in the concert of possible settings in a good Program. (While the current VP interface is a huge step forward over where we were before, there are still many opportunities to innovate in this area as I explore graphical representations of data in future versions.)

Make it responsive during the creative process

I wanted the interface to be responsive, but this was a difficult undertaking remember the slow interface and the picture cell phone). There is a solution however. The key is to make the user interface appear responsive even if the communication channel is slow. All we really care about as a user is our perceived responsiveness. For the most part this can be achieved by using clever (but often complicated) data caching schemes that allow VP to give the illusion that the Kurzweil is responding quickly even when it isn't.