I’m having a bit of trouble translating between the conventional references to panning locations (Bass at 12:00, Rhythm guitar at 2:00, etc.) and Ardour’s panning user interface. It would be nice to have an alternate way (maybe a pop-up with some circular interface?) to adjust the panning.
I really don’t like panpots, since (IMHO) they’re a pretty lousy way of representing the stereo field. But they are industry standard…
Any thoughts?
-TimH
a) surround panning is a Google Summer of Code project and is underway.
b) “bass at 12:00, rhythmn guitar at 2:00” is not a description of a stereo sound stage. if you have two speakers only, you can only distribute sounds along a line that connects the two speakers, which are conventionally denoted as “left” and “right”. the current stereo panning interface corresponds to this model, and has the added benefit that it allows you to pan the two signal streams in a stereo track/bus independently, thus allowing you to control the apparent “stereo width” of the signal rather than just a single position in space. single pan pots for stereo signals (as found in many other DAWs, though notably not in ProTools) do not permit this level of control.