Discussion: preset editor

I was reading here: http://wiki.winamp.com/wiki/MilkDrop_Preset_Authoring

What are the plans/status for preset editor in projectm? I would like to get this operation so the community can easily generate/share new presets.

[revmischa]

No plan right now, one would be great. A emscripten or SDL version would be ideal, because it would be nice and cross-platform.

Related issues:
#145
projectM-visualizer/frontend-sdl-cpp#8
#113

A live editor would be really nice. Especially if it could provide a basic abstraction over the raw preset file code, especially for editing shaders. Labeled fields for various parameters and a basic reference would be very helpful for newbies.
Keyboard and MIDI input to modify global parameters on the fly would be great for performances.

Any other suggestions/desires people have? Who wants to work on this?

[cyberic99]

I don't know if you are aware of this project: https://github.com/jberg/butterchurn

[revmischa]

I don't know if you are aware of this project: https://github.com/jberg/butterchurn

Yes, it's awesome, and we could do something very similar with projectM. There is some emscripten project configuration already in-tree and a stale PR #92 to improve it. It hasn't been revisited since switching to GLES-compatible GL, which should enable projectM to run in a web browser, finally. Someone just needs to do it.

[kblaschke]

This is quite an old, stale topic as it seems, yet still relevant.

My personal take on this would be to implement a preset editor using the existing Qt GUI, which already has a simple text-based editing window, but that provides nothing more than opening the preset file in any other editor.

Since Qt is cross-platform, it works on all major desktop platforms and even Android and WebAssembly. The only non-portable portion of the application is the audio source, there are two separate applications to use either Pulseaudio or JACK, both Linux audio APIs. Replacing these platform-specific implementations with a cross-platform audio library and also adding a file-based audio source which simply streams an audio file into the visualizer would be a good thing to have.

As for the editor, I imagine something similar to Shadertoy would work well, having the editors for the different preset features on one side and a small preview renderer on the other which you can reload by pressing alt-return or something similar.

The preset parser already validates a lot of stuff, showing the error messages in the editor would also be of great use.

[revmischa]

Yeah agree 100% to all of that.
Other option is to build a web UI with emscripten. Anyone can go try their hand at writing presets without even downloading anything, and would make it a lot easier to share and publish presets.

[kblaschke]

Currently working on implementing a fully-featured preset editor in the C++ SDL2 frontend, using Dear ImGui. At first release, it'll have these features:

• Editing the currently loaded preset
• Loading a specific preset for editing
• Creating a new preset from scratch, starting with Milkdrop's default values
• Sidebar with groups for each effect/topic, using accordeon-style collapsible headers
• Use of value sliders for all parameters with sensible ranges (ctrl-click still allows entering any value)
• Graphical color picker UI with adidtional RGB/HSV/hex input for default effect colors (waves, shapes, borders etc.)
• Tooltips on hover for each individual setting, displaying the information from Ryan Geiss' preset authoring guide
• Code editor for expressions and shaders with syntax highlighting
• Expression inputs/outputs and shader inputs are highlighted in the editor and show type/use information on hover
• All Milkdrop expressions are live-compiled on typing, immediately displaying syntax errors
• Refresh the preset preview in the background with Alt-Return or F5 (no live preview/update available right now, as libprojectM doesn't support setting preset values from the outside).