I require hard DATA, plus proper analysis of said data when designing and redesigning.

There are some things I've noticed about these issues in my work in design.

*EVERYBODY thinks they can design it better.

This typically comes from people who have little experience in the design, prototyping, production and marketing fields. Much like the writers who declare themselves to be Music Critics, it is a rather easy task to take something, anything, and be critical about it in a negative fashion with little to no regard for actual realworld reasoning and experimentation that might have taken place during development.

*Disregard for the reasoning that lies behind designing a product in a certain way.

The best example for this one I can think of right now is Band in a Box itself (topical, eh?), Unlike just about any other program being sold today, Band in a Box does not wrie to the windows registry. BB still works from the "old fashioned" .exe file, which can be run standalone on any PC. The only parts of BB that must write to registry are the Fonts, PGMusic DX plugins, and any DXi synths you may wish to use for MIDI.

I don't know for certain the reasoning behind that decision, but do know that PGMusic is rather good about backwards compatibility issues, plus trying to make an ever increasing program load still work on older and slower computers, a factor that I'm sure helps people to still use the product on a worldwide basis. Before someone points out that Realtracks in a file sent to someone with a version of BB that shipped before RealTracks came out (or any other New Feature for that matter), that file *can still be loaded and played* on the older version with the substitution of an earlier MIDI file. This might not be important to those who can afford to keep up with the latest and greatest fast offerings, but I have no idea how many users there are in the world who cannot do that - and neither does anyone who has no access to PGMusic sales records. Even then, there would be a need to figure out how many past users are *still* users, plus a few more datapoints before any good solid enumeration of what's going on could be done.

*For those who say that the BB screen is "too busy" -- this critique I answer in the same fashion as for those who have said same about various controls and systems I've worked on in the day job. "Okay, what would you remove?" -- And back it up with sound logic.

Finally, thinking back on the questions I've attempted to answer on these forums over the years, I would say offhand that a large percentage have been involved with issues other than the complexity of the controls and commands, for example, quite a few have been involved with rather common Music Theory issues, naming of chords, understanding of tempo or timing, Key Signature issues being little understood, concepts of Chorus and Verse based on the vernacular used for lyrics and not accepted Music Theory Practice, use of Fakebooks to try to do song and chord entry when there is no standard out trhere for fake chords and the likes making translation to the types that BB uses to be misunderstood, well, a whole host of issues that have nothing at all to do with the Band in a Box screen and control presentation. Matter of fact, these are all issues that would fit better under the heading of Music Education.


--Mac

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