First of all, let me say that i’m very excited about the cues (and any new Ardour release ). 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 Also, my views are certainly heavily influenced by my use of Live…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 !