track EQ, folders and easy jump to time

Community Ideas for Ardour
#1

As christmas is coming, my wishlist for ardour as follows :slight_smile:

  1. builtin high quality track EQ alike Cakewalk Sonar offers (6-way parametric EQ plus curve types). This would give more intuitive console feeling, other than inserting ladspa effects which suffer bad handling. I think the MixBus surface demonstrates that it’s possible in ardour.

  2. Folders for track groups that can be collapsed when not needed. That would save a lot of space for projects with many many tracks. As I have read, there is something about it coming up in the 3.0?

  3. A simple click somewhere between the tracks should set the time marker there. I don’t like searching for the very narrow time bar.

And last but not least robustness, robustness, robustness. :slight_smile:

#2

For 3), just hit “p” to move the playhead to the current mouse position.

#3

As for 1) I hope Mixbus for Linux will be out before Christmas. :wink:

For In-The-Box mixing this should be sufficient and apart from that Mixbus really sounds amazing, from what I can tell from the short testing I was doing on a friends Macbook. IMHO 6 bands of EQ would be a bit overkill for a general purpose track EQ and would clutter the user interface. 3 or 4 bands should be enough, and if you really need more bands in some cases you still could use a plugin. Try to get the sound right at the source - the less you have to tweak afterwards the better it will sound in the end. “Fix it in the mix” is not the approach to be preferred. :wink:

As for 2) I saw that there is a (experimental?) branch of Ardour 3 named “foldertracks”. So I guess this might be merged to A3 as soon as it’s useful and in a workable state. But for the time being I would suggest using edit and mix groups. This way you can hide all tracks/mixer strips in a group with a single click in the side panel.