Track View Volume Control

Hey there

I’d really like to see a volume control (at least, perhaps pan and an FX bin too if you were to do something like this) as part of the track view in Ardour as seen in Cakewalk Sonar or Cockos Reaper.

Is this something that we are likely to see in Ardour at any point?

Cheers
Child

Hi,
You can show the “Editor Mixer” to the right of the tracks with Shift-E.

Thanks Jonathan, the track inspector on Shift-E is certainly a bit closer to the mark but is a bit clunky. Since having all the controls and a meter in the track header I have barely ever touched the mixer in Sonar, imo it makes a lot of sense to escape the ‘virtual studio’ metaphor (with mixers that look like mixers etc) and to follow what is going on on the page.

With the shift-e track inspector I can still only see one track at a time whereas in the other DAWs I have mentioned I can scale all the tracks and see relative settings across all of them within the Track View.

Having a top to bottom real, physical, mixer makes sense because generally the signal comes in at the top and works its way down towards the fader, whereas in a DAW the time line and audio run across the screen so it makes sense to have horizontal mixing controls to prevent having to switch between left to right and top to bottom concepts (regardless of how clever the colour coding or labeling of tracks is). I guess in this regard Mackie Tracktion goes the furthest towards following these rules by having it’s track inspector on the right of the screen, so the signal chain is completely obvious, I’d be happy if Ardour just went as far as having this as an option on the left of the screen.

I’m really keen to bring my DAW over to Linux and Ardour is the obvious choice but it’s small issues like this which are preventing me from jumping whole heartedly, at the moment it seems my most likely option is Reaper with WINEASIO but it’s not free (in either sense) and whilst it seems to run well under WINE is not a native app which is a concern.

Anyway thanks for the opportunity to mull this over!

Cheers
Child

i actually agree that this would be nice. i’m not sure it’s a priority, more a convenience thing, but i think that eventually it would be handy to have. it would have to be optional though, as some people might see it as just clutter.

porl

ok, something has gone weird here. my reply above is to rothchild’s post, but seems to be (at least for me) listed above it rather than below it.

porl

That’ll be software for you.

Porl I think what happened is when I say your post I also noticed a hanging parenthesis in my own post so I edited it to fix it and for some reason the forum software rearranged the post order - I thought it was a bit odd too.

Still, I’m glad you think that having some extra functionality in the track header is a good idea. I’m surprised that you think some people will see it as clutter because the way I see it is makes everything less cluttered, all of a sudden you don’t need to clutter the screen with a mixer control or the vertical track inspector on shift-e etc

All a matter of perspective I guess. I’ve been looking around a bit more and I’m going to have a play with Tracktion the other thing I like about it is that you can have a full screen of horizontal input meters, which is similar to how I’ve been using Sonar on my 2 monitor setup (ie drag the track inspector to the width of one monitor with horizontal meters and have the arrange frame fill the rest of the second monitor) so that I can have really easily visible 19 inch meters.

Cheers
Child

just tried the latest SVN v2710 (2.0-ongoing) : nice touch with the volume view in the track editor window :slight_smile:

I tried the CVS version, it’s got a meter but not an actual volume control, what’s more the meter is only able to be oriented vertically rather than horizontally which (if the track inspector was more freely adjustable) would allow for really nice long meters). I think there are still a lot of usability and workflow issues with Ardour. For instance not being able to fullscreen a waveform when working on edits. The clunky track hight behaviour (related to the last point). I think the general aesthetic of the app is nice and I can see it working really well as a slightly more complicated ‘Radar’ but in DAW terms I still don’t find it to be a nice mixing environment (it seems pretty good for recording although I’ve not used it in anger yet).

I can’t see that there is anything wrong with having a look through the competition and getting inspired by some of the UI and workflow approaches they have adopted over the years, surely one of the strengths of GNU is that it openly stands on the shoulders of giants. It strikes me that the Ardour UI could make a little more use of this wisdom.

Cheers
Child