This may be a result of running Ardour in too small a pane in Ion (X window manager), but I’m seeing some drawing problems with the user interface on Ardour/GTK 2.8.2 on Linux. The per-track control strips in the Editor window are being displayed misaligned with their tracks (they’re offset vertically), and also the control strips seem to be too narrow, as you can’t see all of the controls.
I can’t find a divider or anything to drag to enlarge them. Here’s a screenshot, so you can see what I mean:
Another problem I’ve noticed with the user interface is in the Mixer window. If I double-click an existing track plugin, the plugin settings window opens fine, but if I leave the plugin window open, switch back to the Mixer window and move the mouse over the track’s control strip again, the plugin attaches itself to the mouse pointer, as if Ardour thinks I’m doing a drag-n-drop. I can unstick it by pressing Esc, but it’s slightly annoying and it happens every time (unless that plugin’s window is already open). Again, I wonder if this might be an interaction between Ardour/GTK and Ion.
I then tried loading a different session, which then shows the narrow strips again…
OK, after some more experimenting, it seems that the first session loaded after launching Ardour has no problem with the strip width. Subsequent sessions that are opened without exiting Ardour seem to then go narrow. However, if I right-click on the channel strip while it’s narrow, it pops back to its normal width.
The vertical misalignment seems to happen in both cases, but seemingly not on sessions with a small number of tracks. In fact, it looks like the misalignment happens when the tracks exceed the height of their viewport and the vertical scrollbar kicks in. Shrinking the tracks to fit restores the alignment. Thanks and HTH…
OK, I might head over to the Tracker and record some of this, after I do a bit more investigation. The narrow/clipped track strip behaviour is not by design, is it?
Just updating this. The drawing weirdness, with the timeline labels ending up jumbled over the toolbar, and the misaligned track headers, are due to an interaction with Ion3. It allows you to set the window size smaller than the minimum requested by the application, if it’s in a tiled frame.
I’d hoped that setting the winprop ignore_min_size = false in my Ion3 config would help, but it still allows the window frame to go below the minimum size. Perhaps it’s just because it’s in a frame, and you can’t necessarily keep every window in a tile set happy. Ion does at least snap it to the minimum frame extent when you’re under but close to it when resizing.
I realise this has been discussed before, but is there any way Ardour’s Editor window could be made to support a smaller minimum size? When I checked on my system, it’s 1252 x 840, and obviously there are displays out there that wouldn’t cope with this. Perhaps making the mixer strips collapsible might be one way to help (you probably don’t need all those pixels!).
I think the clipped track header may be an issue though - I’ll prepare a submission for Mantis.
Oh, actually, adding more tracks or increasing the height of existing tracks can increase the minimum height for Ardour’s Editor window. I’m curious as to how is this handled on other window managers that support the notion of a maximised window.
Going off memory the minimum size for Ardour is 1024x768 IIRC. Most screens these days should be able to handle that without issue. And adding tracks shouldn’t increase that at all.
Ion does at least snap it to the minimum frame extent when you’re under but close to it when resizing.