It’s great to see the Knob Pickup Mode arrive, along with the first signs of file playback in the plugin API. By any objective standard, development of the Meta platform is moving at an impressive pace.
The biggest challenge with using the Meta in a modular system, and it’s something that’s intrinsic to this category of function-switching modules, is the difficulty of remembering what each knob and jack does. The modules we love have well-designed panels that make it very clear what each function is. On the Meta that’s just not possible. This problem will only worsen when the rest of the expanders arrive.
That’s why there’s been a lot of discussion on this board of the layout of the knobs on the screen, which is a potential spot for improvement. I think an even bigger opportunity is adding custom labels to jacks, and then making it easy to see both the jack and the knob assignments. I was reminded of the importance of this feature recently when I made a patch with Clouds and stuck attenuverters in front of all the inputs – meaning that the Jacks page now says that the jacks lead to “Avert 1 input 1,” “Avert 1 input 2,” “Avert 2 input 3,” etc., with no indication of what Clouds parameters are behind those attenuverters.
So: (a) this is a plea to get the jack labeling feature implemented soon, and (b) a further suggestion once that’s complete: consider making a single screen view that displays all the current knob and jack assignments together.
Obviously that’s a lot of text, and it definitely wouldn’t have room for the knob graphics, and it would have to be carefully designed for readability, but if it was legible I’d leave it on the display almost all the time while playing. Even a scrollable view that extended below the screen would be an improvement from paging back and forth between knobs page and jacks page.