I love the new matrix routing in ardour 3 but I find myself turning my head every time to make connections. I would like to make a suggestion. I would also like to mention Clementine music player at this point to back up my suggestion. I noticed that in one of the newer versions their side panel had vertical text. In the following release, due to popular demand, there was an option to have the text in other orientations. I am wondering if Ardour 3 could maybe have such options in their matrix editor. I think the matrix is a great tool for making connections but maybe having one text orientation might frustrate people? I’m not suggesting that the matrix routing be changed in any way as I think it is a fantastic way of doing the job but maybe if the text was in an easier to read manner or it’s orientation was customisable, perhaps 3 different views triggered by clicking on the left vertical panel? Just a though.
@junebug: i think we understand the concern. but i think if you try some mockups (you can use gimp to cut up and rearrange a screenshot) you’ll see why we’ve done it the way we did. its not vertical, in a concession to readability. but its not horizontal, in a concession to not taking up an absurd amount of space on the x-axis. if you have some specific idea, we’d love to hear it, but please keep in mind, as i noted on the “features” page, this matrix has to work not just for small (i.e. stereo) configurations, but also for setups with (e.g.) 64 output channels or 100+ tracks.
horizontal on both axes works fine when neither axis displays many inputs or outputs. as soon as the horizontal axis has more than about 4 outputs, horizontal text there just breaks down. some of this is caused by the arbitrariness of JACK port names. if you look at, say, ProTools and their equivalent dialog, they group the outputs of, say, “M-Audio 1010” and just label each one as “1”, “2” etc. But a JACK port might have a significantly longer name, even ignoring the client part, which makes this kind of heirarchical horizontal layout not as feasible.