Hi all, longtime Ardour user here (jumped around DAWs for years, landed here and stuck). It really is an impressive piece of software, and lately I’ve gotten a lot more into open source generally, which made me want to dig into this properly rather than just gripe about it in my head. That, and I’m a UX designer currently job hunting (in this economy? lol) so I figured I’d put the itch to good use.
Over the past week I picked four specific interactions that I felt created unnecessary friction, and worked through concrete alternatives. This isn’t some crazy redesign, just some scoped fixes to things that currently open a popup window or deeply nested menus for a simple action. The interactions I addressed are:
- Creating a new track (the Add Track window is a lot for the repetitive action of creating a track)
- Adding a plugin (when outside the mixer view) (has to be inserted with precise right-click between existing plugins)
- Editing a MIDI/audio clip (the context menu mixes clip-specific actions with playback/selection options)
- Accessing a plugin’s pin connections (currently its own popup window, feels unnecessary)
You can see the details and thought process here: https://jamesburtonevans.com/projects/ardour-ux/ardour-ux.html
My GitHub repo also has more information: https://github.com/jamesburtonevans/Ardour_UX-Revision
I’m open to any thoughts and feedback. And if there’s anything I can do to help with the UX and other aspects of Ardour let me know.