About the Cues in Ardour 7

First of all, let me say that i’m very excited about the cues (and any new Ardour release :wink: ). I do a lot of theater and performance sound and i often have to use Live to play cues… but Live does not work for me in every situation (cough WFS PlugData plugin with 8 outs cough)

So i downloaded Ardour 7 and gave it a quick spin, just to see if it the new Cues could fit my workflow, which for a distant gig requires live DSP and audio cues. I have a few remarks. I do not doubt that some of it may be already planned to be implemented in a form or another :slight_smile: Also, my views are certainly heavily influenced by my use of Live…

  • I couldn’t find how to add new rows, i guess 16 rows is what we have to work with in A7. Please make it possible to go bonkers with the number of rows ! I usually require between 100 and 200 rows.

  • visual cues : when i launch a clip or a full row, nothing tells me what’s about to play. I found it especially useful when using follow actions like “jump to”. The next clip playing should be highlighted in some way. In Live, when using follow actions, the following clip’s play button blinks.

  • follow actions : Being able to jump to any other clip in the track is neat ! Being able to jump to the (relative) next or the previous clip allows for variations of the same clip to be created and randomly selected. I often use this to create movement in the sound. Selecting a random clip in a group of clips (clips that are neighbours in their column) would be nice too.

  • moving the clips : It seems that one cannot copy/paste or move clips once they’ve been inserted. Dragging a clip creates a copy on click release. It would be nice to be able to drag a clip without making a copy, and to copy/cut/paste clips.

  • deleting the clips : having a clip selected and pressing delete or backspace does not delete the clip, and we can’t select multiple clips and delete (nor copy or move) them.

  • keyboard navigation : Once the focus is on the cues’ grid, i feel that the arrow keys should be able to go from clip to clip.

  • a master track for launching clip rows, or a way to launch a clip row with Enter and select the next would be nice to deal with linear scenarios.

If some of my suggestions make sense for the devs, i sure can refine them and post them to Mantis.

Go Ardour !

3 Likes

Lots of great stuff here. Let me tackle a few things in random order.

You might want to read this document about how Ardour’s clip launching differs from Live’s

Use the Jump dialog the select any set of clips and they will be selected randomly.

I did this for the Push 2 support but not in the GUI. It’s a good idea.

Interesting idea.

There’s no limit in the code, but we didn’t yet figure out how you’re going to navigate around lots and lots of clips (without a control surface with dedicated directional buttons. So yes, for now 16 is the limit, but there’s nothing internally to limit things, and we’ll work it out soon enough. Most demos that I see of people using Live don’t get close to use 16, BTW.

We’ll work on the rest.

4 Likes

Paul, thanks for your answer.

I’ve actually read the blog post in a hurry and forgot to read it properly before posting… my bad.

About the master track : in Live, it’s used to name the row (typically a cue onto which launch the row, or just what the row is about) and specify tempo/meter changes (123BPM 3/4).

Well, we already have this issue with a lot of long tracks in edit view : scroll and shift-scroll. And when a track is selected, the arrows are used to go from track to track. In Cues view, i would scroll to navigate vertically and shift scroll to navigate horizontally. And if a clip is selected, i can now use the arrows to jump from clip to clip.

Maybe people sketching ideas with Live, or really prepared demos show such a small number of rows. I would go out of rows by just wanting to create 3 or 4 musical moments using follow actions on groups of clips. My use of Live is very much centered on music creation for theater productions (which means a lot of cues ; music, ambiances, fx, programmed fades, midi clips to control projector shutters and video cues), but people using it for live electronic music create and play a whole performance with Live, and 16 cues certainly won’t cut it !

Good news !

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