Having come from a background of using emagic logic on pc (yes apple, there WAS a market for logic on the pc… around 45% of logic users i believe)… sorry, still bitter … there are a few things i miss quite a lot that i don’t think any other project has successfully replaced (both with commercial and free software).
oh, and if any of these DO exist in other software (especially ardour) then please correct my ignorance also i am writing these without any concern whatsoever of the difficulty of implementing them, i suppose it’s more of a ‘dream program’ i am thinking of
First and foremost: SCREENSETS!!! i really miss the day where i could press ‘1’ for a dual-screen spanning arrange window, ‘2’ for a dual screen mixer, ‘3’ for arrange on left monitor, mixer on right, ‘4’ for the midi matrix editor (i know this isn’t much use yet for ardour but anyway) etc. for those of you who don’t know the feature, it is basically a glorified way to save screen layouts, but you could have up to 90 (i only ever used about 8) different presets and switch between them with the number keys at the top of the keyboard. i really get annoyed having to use ‘alt-tab’ or whatever to go through my many open windows to find the one i want. i also like the fact that because the logic parent window contained all the others i could just click on the logic task and i would get all windows, plugins etc back to the top.
Second is regarding adding sends or inserts to the mixer. I have found ardour’s ability here to be outstanding, however one problem niggles me… when i add a send to a track, the only way i have found to modify the level is by right clicking, choosing edit and using the dialog. maybe i’m blind and can’t see the obvious way to enable this, but adding a ‘master’ rotary control beside the send name would be really useful for finetuning multiple tracks at once. perhaps there could even be an option (disabled by default to avoid confusion) to add these controls to inserts and plugins as well and make it a ‘wet/dry’ master level.
Third is the way mouse control is used in logic (on the pc anyway, i never used a mac). This is probably more of an issue if (when?) midi sequencing is implemented, but i miss the way that in logic rather than having to choose the pen tool to make a note, bar, object, whatever, then the modify tool to move or stretch the object, then the blah blah tool to do the blah blah thingy etc it was simplified to left mouse button to manipulate (move, stretch, select etc) and the right button was purely used to create new objects. this made it an order of magnitude faster to do repetitive tasks with the mouse. i almost leapt for joy when i pressed the right button on the track list down the left of the arrange window and it immediately opened the new track dialog rather than having to go through yet another drop down menu.
Forth is the customisable transport (that could have as many instances open as you want, all synchronised, as was the case with the other windows). this was especially useful with screensets (i manually copied the transport to the same spot on every screen i used, but a ‘pin’ option would be absolutely wonderful). it was also useful though to have different layouts for different screens- one with large buttons for easy quick recording etc, one with smaller buttons to be out of the way (say for editing audio regions), one with just a big clock (obviously this isn’t necessarily a part of the transport though) for helping recording back from the computer or showing others where the time is up to) etc.
I think i better stop, i may have gotten carried away…
Even if none of these features are implemented, i still believe ardour to be the absolute best multi track audio program around. if it had midi features of the same calibre it would in my opinion de-throne the might logic entirely. as it stands though it beats everything in terms of audio only work. thanks for all the work!