Clickable fader belt and meter overlay

I was reading through an old post about adding knobs or handles to the fader belt to make the faders look more “realistic”. I decided to pull up another DAW to compare. I recognize the design of the fader belt is intended to make it clear that the user can “push” or “pull” the channel from any position along the belt. My comparison made me realize the following.:

  1. I don’t really think it’s obvious (at least coming to Ardour from hardware or other DAWs) that the “fader belt” works in this fashion. I think many of us always grab the top of the belt out of habit. Is there a way to make the intended use more apparent?

  2. If the idea is to make Ardour, a piece of software, “more functional” than a comparable piece of hardware when applicable, it seems as though what might really be missing is the ability to “click” anywhere along the fader region and have the position of the belt (maybe the top or some marker image) automatically adjust to where I click (e.g. Ableton Live). It seems to me this feature would greatly improve the functionality and workflow of the belts (you could just go through all of your tracks clicking on the exact position where you want the new “fader” position to be) while maintaining the current functionality (because you could still drag from anywhere along the belt).

This got me thinking about something else. I know Ardour is not trying to be like any other platform (analog or digital) but simply the best tool it can be for a wide range of applications. So I hesitate to emphasize comparisons to other platforms.

But when I was making this comparison I began to wonder if some form of overlaying of the fader onto the meter (kind of like Ableton, but more directly…and I’m not a fan of the triangle chicklet “fader handle” either) might be even more ergonomic than even the current narrow channel setting in Ardour (i.e. couldn’t we save even more screen space)?

This is my first post. I love Ardour. I have used it for some time now. I am very grateful to all of the people who have made contributions to this wonderful tool. I just began wondering about what’s possible when reading those old post and thought it might be more fruitful to discuss the functionality of various approaches as opposed to rehashing a philosophical debate.

These discussions can be quite fruitful, but right now (June 2018) is a particularly bad time if you expect or desire input from active developers. Once we get 6.0 out the door, which implies the completion of major architectural changes, there’s more chance that we’d show some interest in ideas like this. I certainly don’t see any inherent problem in make a click-without-drag do what you describe (even though I dispute that anyone can get the position exactly right in the way).

Thanks for that response. I really appreciate it. I’d love to participate in this discussion if it comes up again.

I was scanning forum entry titles and misread this as “clickbait fader belt” and started having visions of pop-up tool-tips that say “click here for one weird trick to reduce your gain!” and “ways to reduce your signal level that big companies don’t want you to know!”