I don’t care if this has been posted before. This feature is truly important to me (sorry if I’m missing something). If I have a drum plugin with output to 16 channels, there’s probably no need for them to be shown in the editor—only in the mixer.
People have mentioned that this feature used to exist but was removed because it “caused confusion.” I really don’t understand how that was a valid reason to remove something so essential. Other editors include this feature without causing confusion.
I truly appreciate it and will keep insisting on this matter. Much love!
If we ask any individual DAW user for their 20 “essential” features, I am sure they’d be reasonably able to provide us with that list.
The problem is that if we asked 20 users, we’d likely have between 300 and 400 “essential” features. If we asked 10k users (less than the number of Ardour users), I’d expect the list to expand to between 1-2k “essential” features.
Sometimes we have to make judgements, and every time we do, there are users who disagree with that judgement. Based on complaints about it and multiplying by a factor of between 10 and 100 for “number who didn’t like it but never spoke up, for every 1 person who did”, there’s between 20 and 400 users who are unhappy about this essential feature being missing.
This is a long winded way of saying that it is incredibly unlikely that we’ll revisit this decision at any time in the foreseeable future.
You can always move the drum tracks to the bottom of the editor and Alt-Scroll on them to make them as small as possible, so they won’t bother you as much.
Or hire someone to bring back the hide-in-editor-only feature to your version of Ardour, since the source code is available.
This isn’t really practical because as soon as a new version of Ardour is released the OP will have to go back their someone to get an update. It’s only really an option for someone who maintains their own fork.
If you’ve got at version that does everything you want there’s no imminent need to upgrade to a newer version.
Last October someone running v6.0 posted in the “How do I” section for advice on fanning out a drumkit output and I seem to recall seeing another 6.0 post quite recently.
I’m not saying OP has to fix the code on his own, just that it’s an option if the hide-in-editor-only is a feature he really can’t live without; since the chance of it ending up in the official source/releases seems to be quite slim ATM.
Something else for y’all to think about is how any of this interacts with control surfaces. And yes, it’s not hard to come up with an answer that is logical, reasonable and entirely defensible (e.g. “control surfaces always represent what is shown in the mixer”). But then somebody comes along and says “well, I like to have the editor on screen most of the time, with my control surface giving me instant mixer-style access to whatever is shown there”.
And then we’re back to yet more options for users to navigate between and developers to have to maintain the complex N*N interactions between them all.
