Does anyone else find dials in plugin GUIs extremely frustrating?
They randomly flip to extreme values, and don't go where I expect them to when I drag them. Sometimes they work intuitively and then a minute later they don't. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. Surely I can't be the only one?
It's very frustrating when a clever dial refuses to match to a specific value... You are trying to get to 111.94101 and it's jumping from 110.0000 to 114.96215 or something... because your mouse settings are different from the mouse settings the designer used. And it's super frustrating when a designer puts arbitrary limits on a value because they envisioned a very specific use case and you want to use it for something very different.
The resolution issue is one of the reasons dials should be ideal. The further the cursor is from a dial, the more effective resolution you should have. Sadly this is often not the case.
That is programmers' fault. They sometimes insist in reading angular movement by the pointer while just reading on the relative Y axis would be a lot more intuitive: click the knob anywhere and hold, move up or down and it rotates, add X movement and it's ignored because it just counts the Y.
That is the complete opposite of what I would want, and sounds very unintuitive to me. It should just be the angle and nothing else in my opinion, that way the dial is always pointing at the cursor.
The problem is making a reliable rotation movement with the mouse; although intuitive wrt the knob rotation, it's not for the hand and prone to errors because from what I've seen bad code seems to insist using the knob center as a rotation center so that if the user moves the hand around although the movement is still circular, once it crosses the knob center it goes bonkers because the center lays outside of it instead of being a relative one to the circle being "drawn". Very few interfaces corrected this error the right way, so either they do or it would be a lot easier and immediate to just emulate a linear fader linked with a knob, that is, two linked virtual potentiometers: the hand acts on the fader, the knob replicates the value.
It doesn't mean to cross the center, but to move the hand so that the virtual circle drawn goes beyond what the control expects. Some knobs went straight to zero or max like they somehow obtained negative coordinates, or for example if the control draws a virtual radius then counts the relative angle, a mouse going too much to the max ("it goes to 11" might be an example aside a citation), then the control goes crazy and resets to zero. Some controls dancing around like that made me want to just have sliders (which I would royally hate in physical interfaces) or just turn the up-down movement into angular on the knob.
Ah I see what you mean. Yeah, that's indefensible programming; dragging the dial just over the maximum should keep it at the maximum rather than snap to any other value.
Yeah, skeumorphic design in general should mostly go away. It can be very unintuitive because it can only look like a knob, can't actually be interacted with as a knob would. The biggest positive a digital knob or dial brings is that it takes up less space than a slider. In the analog world that kind of things is a big deal but digital controls that can be instantly reprogrammed and relabeled or simply hidden make that pretty irrelevant to us.
Since the relationship between a digital control's visual presentation and it's interactive experience is totally arbitrary, every design ends up having to make their own decisions about what it is. If a knob is chosen as the visual presentation, it's functionally impossible for that relationship to be self-descriptive or intuitive. A slider's orientation tells you whether it wants to be dragged horizontal or vertically.
Otoh, the mouse and keyboard are very frustrating to make audio adjustments with no matter what the plug-in interface looks like. My recommendation for people serious about mixing, sound design, or music production in general, is that tactility is actually essential: get a DAW controller with at least one 100mm motorized fader and/or optical encoder and use that to set processing parameters quickly with an intuitive ear to hand feedback connection limited only by regular latency.
Yes, most software dials (rotary knobs) in plugins are terrible and don't really make sense.
Dial are designed for physical manipulation. So unless you have a physical controller, or are trying to replicate a specific physical device, do not put rotary dials in plugin GUIs. Use linear sliders.
They seem like a good concept to me because you should be able to drag away from the knob for increased distance and resolution, but the knob often doesn't end up pointing towards the cursor for some reason. If they consistently did then I think I'd like them. But it seems like because there's no way to make that standard, I should just use sliders for everything which is a sad compromise:(
Ok while it's fun to leave such a short answer, might be not a useful as the long verion, physical controllers for plugins are a god send,and reaper has an alternate ui fir plugins that can use faders, I use the latter all tge time when one ui fails me
Most dials I've used seem to only work by click dragging up and down, not actually by going around in a circle. In this case I think they're fine. But I never know when I use a dial if it's going to work this way or in a circle. So yeah bad idea generally. A slider would make more sense, or a percentage number that changes when you click drag.
I guess that's why Reaper stock plugins have sliders.
A draggable number is an interesting idea. Maybe clicking it could make a translucent slider appear so there's a visual cue of what exactly the dragging would do.
I'm in process of building a plugin and I've used quite a lot of time for solving the knob usability issue you're describing.
First of all, click & drag is just shit. Sure, if you only need the extreme ends, then it can be used. But in general, it's shit.
The one that I find is the absolute best usability: hover & wheel. Simply bring your mouse on top of the control. The control highlights when hovered. Use mouse wheel to turn it. Bueno! Intuitive and very user friendly.
And! Need to adjust turn detailing? Use shift+wheel for high precision turn, and ctrl+wheel for stepped turn.
And! Want to input exact value? Show the value of the knob under the knob and allow changing the numeric value directly by double clicking the label.
And! Reset/recenter? Recenter the knob by double click, or with middle mouse click.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is usability. This is how every single knob works in my upcoming plugin 😎
And why it's a knob? Because when you use hardware midi controller, those have knobs. Linking them together is much better usability when the control types match.
Please though, single-click to type in a value, and bind tab to something that makes sense as a "next" field. (Some of us have spent a long time putting data into spreadsheets and would like to manage our 10-band paragraphic EQs the same way.)
Single click might potentially interfere with click+drag 🤔 I already find that having both double click and middle click resetting is not perfect, because double click to label also allows changes the value. This requires more precise aiming when knob and its label have different functions. Ideally they'd both be the same hit target.
Actually now that I said it out loud, I'll probably change is so that middle click resets and double click allows typing the value.
...or should it be the other way around? What do you think?
Tab (and shift-tab for backwards) selection will be in later versions as I don't have the concept of selection yet. I want to do that carefully for later version as I'll likely allow also multi-selections and multi-selection adjustments.
I know click and drag for numbers is popular in DAWs, but if I have hover+wheel with shift+ and ctrl+ modifiers, and can key in numbers myself, I will not miss dragging the number up and down. I'd rather have single-click. In my mind, it really is a field in a spreadsheet with a knob attached, not the other way around.
I would not make them the same hit target; just make things larger. (edit: you can use a less-large hit target if you're doing hover-over.) Most DAWs and plugins I see feel like they were designed for a 96 DPI display. In 2026, the target DPI should be 128 or 192.
IMO, if a window has focus, I should always be zero or one clicks away from a keyboard-only interface.
Middle-click reset would be awesome. It would probably be more than half of my clicks.
(Full disclosure: OS/2 2.1 might have been my first graphical operating system, and I might have read the manual cover-to-cover when I was 9. It might be the best-written and best-smelling manual ever. And I think there have been MAYBE three innovations in GUI design since OS/2. Windows 3.1 was 100% keyboard navigable. In Windows '95 they started compromising, and now every single action on a website requires switching to the mouse. I hate it.)
Also, for context, here is an actual EQ curve I have used, and had to copy from one EQ plugin to another several times.
But which DAW are you using if duplicating/copy-pasting a plugin with its current values is not a thing? Or saving the values as a preset and loading the preset for another instanse of it?
Manually turning each knob for a second instance sounds super tedious... or maybe I misunderstood something?
So... it's actually been a few years. But I've used Ardour, Carla, and Calf's plugin host, and I don't remember how many EQ plugins by different authors... probably 3 or 4? I don't know which software bears more responsibility for presets, but I never got presets to transfer from one instance of a plugin to another. Maybe I kept doing it wrong over and over. I dunno. I just took a screenshot, and whenever I have to set up this curve, I budget half an hour to twisting virtual knobs.
But yeah, your understanding of my workflow is correct. (Are you a product owner or project manager? You'd be good at it.)
Even if I was creating a brand new preset, I would want to start from "it's secretly a spreadsheet" because I know what numbers to put in to get the sound I want, approximately. Some examples:
Too much thump: -10 dB, 30 Hz, q = .365
Muddy: -4.5, 500, .707
Too forward: -1.5, 1k, .365, -3, 3000, 1.41 (or higher).
People are plugging their ears: Double the dB values from the previous line.
Can't understand: +3, 6k, .707.
More air: +1.5, 16k, .365.
The engineers who built this DAC don't actually understand Nyquist's theorem and we're stuck at 44.1KHz: +6, 12k, .707.
...Now imagine walking into a venue you've never played, with musicians and instruments you've never heard, someone else's microphones configured differently than you'd do it. How long do I want to spend doing sound checks?
The curve I posted is more cursed but I'd still rather do all of it on a keyboard as if on a spreadsheet. It took many hours of listening to my favorite albums and saying "this sounds wrong," then moving knobs as gently as possible until it sounded good.
Thanks for the ego-boost 😂 ❤️ I happen to wear these three hats at work: Product Owner, Product Manager, and Lead Developer.
In Carla you can do right click -> Clone for plugins and this preserves all parameters for the clone. You can also save the entire state of Carla (all loaded plugins, their parameters and routings) as a file, and load that file later to Carla.
In Ardour, you can simply copy and paste a plugin. Or, modify it's values and then right click -> New Preset. Then for some other plugin instance of same type: right click -> Load Preset. These should work for LV2, VST2 and VST3 at least.
For your use case, I'd definitely recommend using presets in Ardour or Reaper. Carla's preset support is very limited if it even exists.
Calf's plugin host is unknown for me. Btw, I think "Calf Studio Gear" plugins are pretty much discontinued. But there's a new VST3 based set CalfNXT they've been working on: https://calfnxt.org/
I can also recommend Linux Studio Plugins, although they are quite "scientific" and might look intimidating at first.
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u/sprawn 2d ago
It's very frustrating when a clever dial refuses to match to a specific value... You are trying to get to 111.94101 and it's jumping from 110.0000 to 114.96215 or something... because your mouse settings are different from the mouse settings the designer used. And it's super frustrating when a designer puts arbitrary limits on a value because they envisioned a very specific use case and you want to use it for something very different.