I originally posted these thoughts to a visually impaired potential Ambika user in a gearslutz thread and I believe my thoughts there were relevant to discuss here as well:
Do you think it’s a good feature that the Ambika remembers what page was last selected beneath each of the eight switches? In other words, if you’re on the S1 mixer page and move to the S2 filter page, and then press S1 once, you’re taken directly to the mixer page, and not to the oscillator page? Or would it make more sense to always “press S1 once for oscillators, S1 twice for mixer, S3 twice for voice LFO”, and so forth?
I believe it would be easier to operate the Ambika purely from muscle memory, if there always was a consistent sequence of button presses and knob twists to set a specific parameter.
There is one problem though, and that is the S8 system pages. The parameters on the system pages depend on the switches below, which means that there doesn’t seem to be a way to escape out of the system pages reliably with a specific user input - you’ll always need to check visually on the display what page that is active. Nevertheless, I believe that a move towards stateless page memory would be a benefit to anyone who doesn’t like to depend on looking at the display when operating the Ambika. And as long as the amount of subpages is three or below, you save more time by having a consistent set of steps to change a parameter, than the supposed time you “save” by having the system remember your last active subpage beneath a switch, but with you then having to verify this state visually every time you press a switch.
Any thoughts of the benefits and drawbacks of stateless page memory? Am I the only one who feels that I’m constantly arriving on the wrong page by accident? Especially on the Shruthi, but also for the Ambika. (I realize that this is only possible for the Ambika which has a very flexible knob/switch layout - the Shruthi interface is simply too crowded for a stateless interface to work)
