VU-meters: centered on screen or above the channel identicators

[lausvi]

I see that in the latest v0.10.0 the top-row VU-meters are now centered (over the display width) unlike before when they were above the respective channel (numbers). While I can see the idea here, I'd still prefer having them over the channel indicators, or having this as a selectable setting in the config file.

[dwhinham]

There's not really any "right" way to solve this, it's difficult.

The MT-32 has 9 parts that can be mapped to any of the 16 MIDI channels. 9 doesn't divide into any screen dimension evenly.
You have 1-2-3-4-5-R on the status row. In previous versions, the bar above 'R' (rhythm) was actually for Part 6, so even though 1-5 had a bar above the respective status bar character, the rest were wrong.

Then you have either 16 or 20-character wide screens, so there's possible blank space to deal with.

What should I do? I could:

• Display all 16 MIDI channels (like SoundFont mode) - the MT-32 will never react to 7 of them, but the space will be filled and it can be centered properly.
• Display 1-5 and R above the correct status letters, and leave the rest of the space blank.
• Go back to the way it was in < v0.10.0; 1-5 have the correct bars above them; 'R' onwards are wrong.

I don't like adding config options for this kind of thing, the code for trying to deal with the bar drawing alignment is complex and annoying enough.

[lausvi]

Thanks for the explanation! I must admit that I didn't know the MT32 had 9 parts, now I can see why this isn't as simple as I thought. And I can sure understand the bar drawing stuff might not be the simplest thing and with all the possible display sizes too :)

Trying to think about it, this is the best I could come up with! I have no idea if this totally messes up with the way you draw/update the display or show error/status messages so this might be of no help at all, feel free to use these ideas or not :) I used http://avtanski.net/projects/lcd/, a great tool, to sketch these.

The # denotes a bar-graph character.

20x2 LCD layout with bargraphs on right (no "total" output bargraph as it wouldn't stand out from other channels clearly):

20x2 LCD layout with bargraphs next to the channel indicators (with "total" output shown as it stands out nicely):

20x2 LCD layout when a MIDI/error message appears (all bargraphs + volume shown on the bottom line while the message is shown on the top row)

16x2 LCD layout with bargraphs next to the channels: