The upcoming monitor section seems to be a great new feature in a3. But there is one thing I am missing: Why can’t we choose the output channels within the dialog? That could be a little dropbox like down in the tracks and/or busses. Perhaps there are more then just one pair of monitors to listen on.
That would the last to get it finally perfect I think.
Regards
Tim
Why isn’t the ‘window -> audio connection manager’ routing matrix good enough for that job ?
A real question, I am interested in your thoughts.
Compare it with a real hardware monitor controller.
Sometimes you would like to monitor your stuff on different speakers for a short or a long time, so it would be nice to manage all monitoring switching (dim/mono/mute/phase and this threads case: monitor pairs) and gaining through one dialog.
@dtk: whatever the button said, it would launch you into a matrix editor anyway. there are some limited facilities for button menus showing basic connection possibilities, but its likely to not be enough.
@dtk: Do you mean something like this: You have, say, three buttons, labeled “outputs 1”, “outputs 2” and “outputs 3” . With matrix editor, you could assign that pressing “outputs 1” would route output of the bus to hardware outs 1 & 2 , pressing “outputs 2” would route output of the bus to hardware outs 3 & 4 and so on.
The point is that if you have several monitor speakers and you want to often change between them, doing this all through matrix editor can be too slow and too complicated for such an often repeated task. Thats why there should be that kind of preset buttons to change state of output matrix with one click. (Not meant to be an idea of technical implementation, just the outcome…).
ghert, thats the way I meant. That could increase productivity of the monitoring/mixing workflow, because you can concentrate on the mix as you switch the outputs directly, not patching first and listen second 
Yes, I agree that some people would find it very useful. Maybe you should file a feature request on mantis?
Personally, I do prefer hardware monitor controller, mainly for two reasons: First, I can’t live (er… record or mix) without a physical, hardware volume knob. Secondly, I do often record many instruments at same time, meaning I need number of different monitor mixes, and it takes number of outputs of my sound card.
However, I’d find it very useful to have similar scheme on inputs of monitor bus. For example, if I’m making four different headphone monitor mixes for musicians, it would be very useful to be able to choose easily which of those mixes I hear from my main speakers.
@ghert ok, that goes a lot further than just speaker set switching into the realms of external input switching and monitoring as well.
When the monitor section was designed speaker management and external input monitoring were discussed and thought to be a couple of features too far. However, starting a request on Mantis for both of these would not hurt and would allow us to see how popular these features might be.
However, I'd find it very useful to have similar scheme on inputs of monitor bus. For example, if I'm making four different headphone monitor mixes for musicians, it would be very useful to be able to choose easily which of those mixes I hear from my main speakers.
Solo is your friend in this case, exactly how it would be done on a console. You would be using a bus for each of the musician’s headphone mixes presumably and then you just solo that bus.
Seablade@ghert: Some people would like to have the functionality but don’t have enough cash für a hardware monitor controller. I think, Mackie’s BigKnob is a reference controller but quite expensive (about 279 Euros here in germany).
So when a3’s monitor section could be controlled by a midi controller or key-shortcuts, that would help a lot, I think.
@all: I will check out mantis and hope, that it will be a popular feature request.