Time Stretch&GUI

How do I undo a “nope, I don’t like this” time-stretch? Seems like it’s a forgotten feature.

Is there a way to put a fader knob/cap on the sliders?

Is there a way to put a fader knob/cap on the sliders?...
All previous attempts to persuade the Ardour dev(s) have been unsuccessful... good luck :)

That’s a good suggestion regarding the time-stretch. All other changes (such as trims, fades, etc) can be re-tweaked later. But once you’ve time-stretched a region, you only get that one chance to undo it. We need a “revert to natural length/tuning” for each region, don’t we?

There are a couple of practical reasons for using the “capless” sliders. First, a capless slider can use the entire length of the slider for the “throw”. If you put a cap on it, then the travel becomes less by the height of the cap, giving you slightly less precision. It is part of Ardour’s design specification that it remain scalable to many different screen sizes and that the fonts be arbitrarily scalable, and this makes it easier to achieve that. Secondly, Ardour is under continuous development, and new controls are added by people all the time. Because these developers aren’t always gui experts, it is important to keep the theme simple so the functionality can be added without having to create a complicated photo-realistic gui for your new feature. Finally, the continuous fader makes it more obvious to users that you can grab “anywhere” in the slider area, not just the knob cap. This is particularly important if the fader is moving due to automation.

All of these challenges can be overcome, but it takes extra effort to keep things sync-ed up and consistent. If you like faders with caps, you should use Harrison’s Mixbus. ( full disclosure: I’m the primary developer for Mixbus at Harrison )

Best,
-Ben