Hi everyone.
First a huge thank to Paul and all the Ardour team to bring us an amazing DAW. I’m a french sound engineering student, in my last year of studies, and I would have a suggestion to make to the community, users and developers.
I’m still a student but I can say that I have feet into the professional world. I have made several musical, documentary and short movie projects, I mean editing, mixing and mastering. I use Adobe Audition (which was Cool Edit Pro) since 6 years and ProTools since 3 years and I’ve already worked on Nuendo and Sonar.
I use Ardour since October 2006 (the 0.99.3 release) and I really like the interface of ardour 2, I found it nice, very clear and intuitive.
But there is a very powerful concept in Adobe Audition (in fact it’s one of the Cool Edit’s concept that have made it famous), that I’ve never find in another DAW, and with which we can save lots of time for an audio work. For me, Cool Edit Pro, so now Audition, has found how to be the most effective in audio production. I think it’s the most powerful way to mix and edit ever imagined.
Also it’s very simple, it’s the concept of two modes, EDIT and MULTITRACK SESSION windows.
In fact, like most of DAW, there is a basic “session mix window”, with different tracks on the timeline, and some waveforms onto tracks, but there is too an “edit waveform window”.
For example, in a mix session, like in ardour, you can do all the basic stuffs on waveform blocks, like cut, copy/paste, etc… But now if I want to look deeper in a waveform, in order to edit it (to normalize or apply any effect on the waveform, or remove crack, noise, etc…) I just click on the waveform so I pass in the edit mode. And there, it’s so much intuitive, quick and easy to edit like we want to do (for example to make a loop, with clean end and start)!!! I find it great !!!
Please take a look on those videos, especially in “Quick Tour of the Audition Interface” :
- Audition Work Areas & Windows pt. 1 and pt. 2
- Edit View
- Multitrack View
-> http://www.vtc.com/products/audition15.htm#
So my idea is “why not integrate an EDIT mode, with a dedicated EDIT window in Ardour 3.0 !!!”
In my opinion it could be a fantastic improvement, not only for my little person, but because it will be a good innovation for all users.
So that’s some ideas to improve ergonomics side of Ardour, and I’m aware with the fact that Ardour is at a point where the source code of the UI is maybe not as much easy to change or implement. In any case, I hope I’ve explained myself enough clearly.
Thanks for reactions or suggestions.
Cheers.
L_Cut