Touchscreen:

the touchscreen is likely resistive rather than capacitive. Phones these days have capacitive screens with multi-touch and this is what you have been acclimated to as a consumer product. Capacitive has its advantages and disadvantages. Try to get accuracy with sweaty hands on a capacitive screen. Resistive can generally be more accurate (in general) sweaty or not due to the higher resolution (generally) of the resistive sensors vs. capacitive. Cost is another consideration which likely favored resistive touch for the Montage as the screen tends to be one of the higher unit cost items.

Take a look at: http://blog.junipersys.com/resistive-vs-capacitive-touchscreens/ for a bit of a rundown. The part about the industry norms also comes into play - as there is a legacy of resistive screens meaning best for use when "your intent in touch location is important" (industrial use) vs. "it doesn't matter if the screen touch flakes out" (consumer use) - because you'll just try again. The tides of the sea are changing and soon the prevalence of capacitive screens will force the industry (even industrial use) to use capacitive screens - because resistive will be a low volume play - and solutions to improve the capacitive accuracy will be forced to become mainstream. Although the cellphone industry is of course pushing this to improve the user experience on its own (which is a 1,000lb gorilla due to high volume).

Resistive touch do not tend to lend themselves to swipe type actions due to the constant pressure you need to apply to get this to work. Due to the shortcomings - the OS support at the driver level of these screens may not give great tools to the GUI to achieve swipe. Or Yamaha could have implemented it and found their test engineers were whining about how terrible the swipe experience is with the screen. Or the GUI framework they chose may not itself have much support for swipe control. Whatever the case may be - you'll notice that the landscape in keyboard touchscreens currently utilizes resistive touch screens and not much swipe and drag support. The same limitations or "ingredients" apply. If you (thought experiment) did get swipe - there would no doubt be situations you wish you could turn it off because the experience is degraded with swipe support turned on.

Performance Name length limits:

This comes from the amount of space allocated for all the performance data for one performance. The performance name is stored in an area called the "PERFORMANCE COMMON" portion of the MIDI Parameter Change Table. The total size of this chunk is 94 bytes and holds other data such as assignable knob values, performance-level assignable knob controller numbers, performance-level filter / portamento / ribbon / foot controller , and other parameters.

I do see 10 reserved bytes after the performance name string - so maybe there's a chance for 10 more characters if those reserved bytes are not internally used for something (which they may be). There's also the issue of data entry (GUI) limits which would have to be adjusted and also max len for the temporary buffer adjusted so you could search for more character length strings. Maybe for your use the display could still cut off the name before all characters - but if this is not desired (likely to get a complaint) then the display area needs to be increased or font size shrunk to fit all the new characters added. This may cause its own problem but perhaps the font size scales bigger for shorter names and smaller for the longest names. Placing the burden of complexity on the GUI when you can probably abbreviate like the rest of the world. "Wrld Ona Strng FS" instead of "I've Got The World On A String - Sinatra Version" -- or your own creative use of the 20 characters available. I do understand the request - but there's something to be said for searches where you don't have to type as much "stuff" to find a hit - assuming you have a sense for the possible abbreviations of what you're looking for.

The main point is that the performance name "lives" within a structure that itself has a limit of how big it is. There's 640 of these user performances - and even more when you consider the library + preset slots. When you multiply all this out - you arrive at a huge amount of data for everything - and something has to give. The performance name is probably one of the least important -- I mean it's 20. MSDOS filesystem which constrained names for some products had an 11 character limit (8 +3). And LCD screens with only two lines and no graphics have huge limits on max length as well. I see both sides and would rather have more sound-shaping flexibility than name-calling flexibility.

German Layout:
Interesting international support question. Its good to bring this up. Historically Yamaha has only released English and Japanese regionalized firmware versions which would be one way of supporting the feature (custom keyboard within each regionalized firmware version). Or the "English" version could have multiple keyboards supported and some config for the region. It hasn't traditionally been something Yamaha does much of - so offering such regional support would be a nice paradigm shift - in my opinion.

On a related note - I wonder what happens if you plug in your German keyboard (USB) to the USB device port and use it to type instead of the on-screen keyboard. The underlying OS has already been "set" to a certain region for the keyboard - not sure if this will improve or worsen your experience (it shouldn't map correctly). Something to try.

MIDI Receive Channel Flexibility
There's the other thread with this specific question - I'll let that other thread track that. Although past threads have addressed this as well - so somewhat of a rehash. It's not bad to have feedback, however, from multiple sources so Yamaha understands what the "top 10" list is of users in terms of critique.

Stefan wrote:

The Yamaha Montage is a great synthesizer! The sound quality is a real improvement compared to Motif. But unfortunately the software is currently not really state of the art 2016.
Let me explain that:
- There is a touchscreen. But why doesn't it behave like a modern Touchdisplay? Why is scrolling not possible by a gesture or why can I not swap performances in Live Sets by pick and place?
- Why are Performance Names limited in length? I guess 12 characters. I have to shorten the Song Names. Not really good if I'm searching for a special song.
- Why is it not possible to change the layout of the software Keyboard to german layout?
- Why are Midi channels not assignable per part?

I hope this will be improved by next firmware updates!

For the record: none of these things are in any way important to me. But then I am not the one who posted that article. Pretty scary that there are two users in this forum with the same name. @Badmister: Is this expected????

Stefan (the one w/"The Voice" emblem) wrote:

Pretty scary that there are two users in this forum with the same name. @Badmister: Is this expected????

At some point the forum showed first and last names - I think they received feedback that some users wanted to hide their last names in order to prevent whatever bad things would come from posting under full-name identity. This all happened before my time here. The policy is to truncate the last name - so if you have the same first name -- this is what happens.

The easiest solution is to upload an "avatar" which will distinguish you apart from those using the default icon.

Since same first names for common names is something one runs into all the time - I do not see a problem with the same first name appearing in the forum given you do have the ability to set yourself apart using a picture.

Okay, that's good to know. Thanks! I was totally surprised by that. Never seen that in any other forum. I 100% agree that the last name should not be shown. But other forums handle this by having a user name which has actually nothing to do with you real name. I will certainly change my avatar. And maybe also my first name - if I can.