Navigation through Yoshimi is done with a combination of menus and buttons. If in doubt simply hover the mouse pointer over these and usually a tooltip will appear with additional information. In some cases you will get additional information just hovering over certain parts of windows.
All rotary controllers respond to mouse pointer drags that are an average of the vertical and horizontal movement, so you can drag from left to right, bottom to top, or even bottom left to top right.
Using the left hand button gives quite coarse control. With the middle button the control is finer and the scrollwheel also gives quite fine control without having to move the mouse itself. For all of these, if you hold down the Ctrl key at the same time, you will get much finer control.
The right hand button is an exception as a click on this will immediately set the control to its default value, and using the Ctrl key here will initiate a MIDI learn event.
Sliders behave in a similar way, although there is no difference between the left hand button and the middle one. Again, most of these can be learned.
Almost all of these controls have dynamic tooltips showing you what the current setting is.
Any check/tick box with a pale blue surround can be learned. These will be On if the incoming value is greater than 63, otherwise Off. The counters and spinboxes with pale blue surrounds to the arrows can also be learned and will give a scaled response to the incoming value.
Blue arrowed menus are a bit strange, as you have to first click on them to open up the menu, then click the right hand button while holding Ctrl. The incoming value will again be scaled to the numeric menu range.
In many places you will see a pair of small dark blue buttons marked 'C' and 'P'. These enable you to copy the entire contents of just that section and later paste it to either a Presets file or to another identical section. For example you can copy AddSynth Global in part 1 and then paste it to any other AddSynth Global engine, such as part 4 kit item number 7 AddSynth.
With all windows, the title bar has the Yoshimi name usually followed by the instance number if it's not the main one. Most of the windows also have additional information, such as what section/context they represent and from part level upwards you will see the current part number, instrument name and if it is a kit element the kit item number.
Yoshimi uses its own filer, maintaining style consistency with everything else. The two views here are that of loading an Instrument patch, and the variation for setting and using 'Favourites'. The top text line on both of these views is a reminder as to exactly which file type you are dealing with.
In the first view, directories come first with an appropriate icon, then the files. Only files with a valid extension are shown - Yoshimi would in any case reject any others. Also, the Name field and Load button change depending on the context.
Clicking on the Add button will copy whatever is in the path field to the favourites list.
In the favourites view, the currently selected one is highlighted in blue, and this one can be made the default. It will then be placed at the top of the list. Currently the maximum number of favourites is 20 - although most people only seem to set five or six.
Next (Getting Started)