Recently I’ve been working with lots of short regions in Ardour, putting them together all on one track to create new music out of samples from other music. The samples are taken such that playing them back with a sample player at a particular tempo is not desirable, they need to be played back to back to allow some variation in tempo and timing. A single track in Ardour has provided a really nice way of arranging them, but keeping track of what region has what music is difficult. Having the region names showing on the bottom of each region in the track has been helpful, but I’m going to be working with hundreds of different regions and I won’t even know every one by its name.
My idea for a solution is the addition of doodle tracks. They would be attached to each audio track just like automation, except instead of moving rubber bands you can draw freely with your mouse. Each region would have its own canvas within the doodle track that displays the region’s doodle and allows you to draw on it or erase it. Moving further with the concept, in addition to doodles per region, there could be doodles per audio/midi track (and master) and per track group.
The doodles would allow editors to easily identify regions and/or compose with symbols or graphic music notation.