2.2. Turntable Controls

The turntable GUI contains multiple controls and the realtime displays for each turntable. To save some space on your desktop and to give terminatorX the traditional audio-application look, terminatorX features "knob"-widgets. These widgets work pretty straight-forward: click somewhere within the widget and keep the left mouse-button pressed. Now move the mouse up and down or left and right to increase/decrease the control's value. All those widget are coupled with a text entry field since 3.70, which allows you to enter values directly.

A turntable is visualized by two panels: the control and the audio panel. These are no longer combined for better layout management.

Sometimes you might find a certain audio or control panel unnecessary - simply eating up space. Since release 3.73 it is possible to minimize audio and control panels to the panel bar with the tiny button with a blue bar icon in the upper right edge of each panel. This bar works just like GNOME's window list or KDE's kicker: When a panel is minimized a button in the bar will appear, representing the minimized window. On clicking this button the button will be removed and the minimized panel is displayed again. When no panels are minimized the panel bar automatically disappears to save display space.

2.2.1. Turntable Audio Panel

The complete audio-file loaded into a turntable is displayed in the green-on-black audio-widget. When playing terminatorX will indicate the current position within the sample with a red cursor (a blue/green cursor indicates the turntable is muted).

Additionaly there are some controls above the audio-display:

2.2.2. Turntable Controls

These controls are now grouped within functional panels. The number of panels depends on the number of plugins loaded. terminatorX allows hiding the controls not required via the yellow triangle button. To un-hide just click the button again. The first panels are the standard controls for a turntable, then follows the dynamic FX-section and below that follow the pitch and volume controls.

2.2.2.2. Trigger Panel

The trigger panel holds all controls related to triggering the turntable. For more details on synchronization see Section 2.3 (synchronization).

  • Trigger! Button

    Pressing this button triggers the turntable now. With the audio engine enabled this will cause the turntable to start playing back audio from the beginning of the sample.

  • Stop Button

    Guess what, this stops this turntable's audio-playback.

  • Master Button

    Enabling this button makes this turntable the sync-master. Note that only one turntable at a time can be the sync-master.

  • Client Button

    This button marks the turntable as sync-client, so it will be triggerd with the master automatically.

  • Sync-Cycles Selection

    The sync cycles determine how often a sync-client should be triggered. With a setting of zero the sync-client will be (re-)triggered with every trigger of the sync-master. A setting of 1 will (re-)trigger the client every second master-triger and so on.

Below the effect queue a turntable shows some more controls:

  • Pitch Control

    The pitch control allows setting the default playback speed for that turntable (the "motor" speed). Negative values will result in the sample being played backwards.

  • PAN Control

    This parameter allows setting the position of the turntable's main signal within the stereo panorama.

  • VU Meter

    The displayed signal shows the turntable's current signal not including the echo-signal which is mixed separately.

2.2.3. The Effect Queue

With release 3.70 the effects are no longer hardcoded into the turntable. The effects are now arranged within an per-turntable effect-queue. The effect sequence is configurable by the user. To move an effect to higher position within the queue, press the blue upward arrow button. This will cause the effect to be renderd before the following effects. The blue downward arrow button will move the effect down by one position. It will then be rendered after the preceding effects.

There are two types of effects: the traditional built-in effects (Lowpass and Echo) and LADSPA plugins. The built-in effects are always available and cannot be removed (but disabled). There can be only one instance of a built-in effect. The LADSPA plugins on the other hand may be instanciated multiple times and can be removed from the effect queue. Press the blue cross button to achieve this.

Now since release 3.71 the built-in echo effect is treated differently from other effects. Where all other effects feed their signal back into the effect queue the echo effect doesn't touch the input signal. It's echo-signal is mixed seperately from the turntable's main signal to allow a different panning value for the echo-signal. This mode of operation does have some side-effects: imagine a lowpass filter with a position after the echo effect in the effect queue. This will result in the turntable's main signal being lowpassed but it will leave the echo-signal un-lowpassed.

Some may call this behaviour a bug - whereas I would consider it a feature ;). Anyway if the above description didn't clear things up maybe the displayed figure does. It shows a schematic effect queue with the built-in effects and two LADSPA effects enabled. Now with this setup you will not hear anything from the second LADSPA effect in the echo-signal.

For more information on a LADSPA plugin, press it's panel's label and a small info box will pop up.

2.2.4. Lowpass Panel

terminatorX features a builtin resonating lowpass filter that can be configured with this panel.

2.2.5. Echo Panel

Additionaly terminatorX features a built-in echo effect. It can be configured with this panel.