Suggestions for the new DP

[Dubstylie514]

with editing I should be able to do more things with groups.. for instance:
I should be able to stretch with a grid lock, and I should be able to stretch multiple tracks at the same time... and if you already can.. you have the permission to call me dumb (as long as you tel me how)

[FMiguelez]

.

Appart from fixing the few bugs left, what I'd LOVE to see in DP's newer version is to be able to use different colors for the same tracks.

That would make my orchestrations so much faster. Measures 4-19 red=melody. Then, some of the instruments who played the melody turn into the foreground=blue, etc.
This way, you can see your orchestration soooooo easily, and selecting the instruments for a section to work on them to attain proper balance would be a breeze.
I don't think this would be too much trouble for the programmers to do, right?

[blue]

I should be able to stretch with a grid lock

Hold down the command key.

[Shooshie]

.

Appart from fixing the few bugs left, what I'd LOVE to see in DP's newer version is to be able to use different colors for the same tracks.

That would make my orchestrations so much faster. Measures 4-19 red=melody. Then, some of the instruments who played the melody turn into the foreground=blue, etc.
This way, you can see your orchestration soooooo easily, and selecting the instruments for a section to work on them to attain proper balance would be a breeze.
I don't think this would be too much trouble for the programmers to do, right?

For me, the answer to that is simply to use more tracks. Then you can view them all combined in the MIDI Edit Window. But lots of MIDI tracks has always been my style. I create a new track at the drop of a hat, to hold any little effect I might want to process separately. Later, if I want to, I might consolidate tracks by simply dragging their contents to a common track for that particular instrument. But during the writing process, I believe in USING DP's unlimited tracks feature!

Shooshie

[emulatorloo]

I should be able to do more things with groups

Why don't you send your suggestions to MOTU:




http://www.motu.com/other/feedback

Suggestion Box - suggestions@motu.com

This is a drop box to send your product related wish-lists. Got a great feature idea for Digital Performer? Send it here.
Suspected bug reports should be sent to technical support.

---

[FMiguelez]

Shooshie: I know what you mean. I use TOO many tracks already, usually more than 6 or 7 for each instrument (7 for Vlns I, 7 for Vlas, 7-8 for VCs, etc). I mean, a whole orchestra will end up having dozens of them.

I just feel that color coding different parts of the composition (melody, counter-melody, foreground, background, etc) makes it a snap to just be able to see your orchestration with a bird's eye in the TO, for instance.

I find that when you have so many tracks with full orchestral sequences, it just becomes not the easiest thing in the world to know who is playing what at any given time. For instance, if the melody in a section is played by Vlns I, Fls, Cl, and VCs, it would be so easy to not only hear but SEE the orchestration (color coded). Especially at the mixing stage. Then it would be a breeze to select only those red (in this case) trakcs for that section and open them in the SE to mix a credible balance among them, and then blend them realistically with the other elements.

I've been doing this wiht gropus, but I end up having dozens of gropus, most of them usable for a small section of the piece.

TO ME, this is the only thing I'm missing when working with MIDI. I came to DP from Cakewalk (before it was Sonar), and it was a very nice way of working with MIDI orchestrations.

I wrote to MOTU once about this, but never got an answer. Maybe not a lot of people would find this useful, or there might be other priorities.

Anyway, if this Waves thing gets sorted out soon, I wil FINALY be able to move to DP 5.11. The tracks folders alone will make it so worth it

Saludos,

Fernando

[bassie12]

It would be nice if things we could do back in the 3.11 days could be done today: Re-ordering tracks in the sequence editor without stopping playback.... cutting, pasting & merging audio bites without stopping playback or invoking the spinning pizza of narcolepsy.....dropping a memory start point without stopping playback.....clearing meter peaks without intermittently stopping playback....on and on. I'm not asking for anything impossible or new. We did this stuff on G3s with 512 meg of RAM. A lot of this stuff is impossble in other DAWs, which is one of many reasons I ended up using DP. The dark ages of DP4.0-4.12 seem to have lowered the bar, and our expectations.

I actually like DP better than any other DAW I've ever used, and 5.11 is absolutely the best OSX version of DP. But lately, I've had more fun during sessions using protools HD3, because we (my clients and I) never find ourselves waiting for the spinning thing...the software(7.3.1) is rock solid, if boring, compared to DP5.11, and all we find ourselves concerned with is music.

Maybe 6.0 will be different.

[Tritonemusic]

It would be nice if things we could do back in the 3.11 days could be done today: Re-ordering tracks in the sequence editor without stopping playback.... cutting, pasting & merging audio bites without stopping playback or invoking the spinning pizza of narcolepsy.....dropping a memory start point without stopping playback.....clearing meter peaks without intermittently stopping playback....on and on.

Hell yeah, man. There wasn't even a hiccup when doing those things and it kept the work flow nice and smooth. It was a true pleasure. I've mentioned this in the past but nobody seemed to share my sentiments. It's nice to see that I'm not alone. Remember when MOTU bragged about these capabilities in the past? "In the past"...what a sad phrase indeed.

[Shooshie]

It would be nice if things we could do back in the 3.11 days could be done today: Re-ordering tracks in the sequence editor without stopping playback.... cutting, pasting & merging audio bites without stopping playback or invoking the spinning pizza of narcolepsy.....dropping a memory start point without stopping playback.....clearing meter peaks without intermittently stopping playback....on and on.

Hell yeah, man. There wasn't even a hiccup when doing those things and it kept the work flow nice and smooth. It was a true pleasure. I've mentioned this in the past but nobody seemed to share my sentiments. It's nice to see that I'm not alone. Remember when MOTU bragged about these capabilities in the past? "In the past"...what a sad phrase indeed.

Yep, DP used to be the fastest gun in the west. I did CD's on a G4 400 MHz, with up to 80 tracks (40 stereo tracks) of audio and hundreds of MIDI tracks. When it got up to that level, it let me know it was working hard, but it never failed. The faders may have jerked around at that level, but if I recorded a move, it recorded it smoothly. Everything just worked right, all the time. It never crashed. The only time I lost data was when I was recording one time when suddenly a new ATA parallel cable went bad. (never heard of that before, but that's exactly what happened)

Anyway, I think there's something to Bassie12's line that the dark days of version 4.x have lowered our expectations. I'm just thrilled finally to have a version that works about as fast as 3.11 did, and without crashing. This whole OS X experience has been a terrifying ride. What was meant to be the be-all, end-all of audio and MIDI has become a gamble. Every upgrade is another roll of the dice. I just hope that 5.11 is not a fluke; that they've really started to figure all this stuff out.

I KNEW we were in for a wild ride when I first heard that we were going to have an OS with pre-emptive multi-tasking. How do you get such an OS to do things exactly when you want them to happen while sharing CPU space with hungry plugins, VI's, networking, and external apps? As we've seen, that's been more of a problem than Apple ever dreamed it would be.

But I think we finally have the answer. The Intel machines just throw so much power at it that the problem rolls over and dies. DP is "free to be" now.

[crossing fingers and hoping]


Shooshie

[rcannonp]

I really don't long for the old days of extension sets and the OMS vs. FreeMIDI wars. DP 3 may have been ridiculously more efficient, but It crashed so much for me that I never got to see that. Since 4.6 it's been one of the most stable apps that I have, and I haven't been able to crash 5 yet. I think that it could still be more efficient, but that doesn't matter if it's not up and running.

After coming to DP from Cubase, I really miss the user defined regions and being able to color any region whatever I want. DP's region handling makes no sense to me and seems very outdated. I've spent most of my life dealing in visual arts, so I like to have visual feedback of what I'm working on. Having to remember where I put the changes or listen through the whole piece to find them and then make fiddly time range selections gets to be a bit of a pain for me.

[Shooshie]

I really don't long for the old days of extension sets and the OMS vs. FreeMIDI wars. DP 3 may have been ridiculously more efficient, but It crashed so much for me that I never got to see that. Since 4.6 it's been one of the most stable apps that I have, and I haven't been able to crash 5 yet. I think that it could still be more efficient, but that doesn't matter if it's not up and running.

After coming to DP from Cubase, I really miss the user defined regions and being able to color any region whatever I want. DP's region handling makes no sense to me and seems very outdated. I've spent most of my life dealing in visual arts, so I like to have visual feedback of what I'm working on. Having to remember where I put the changes or listen through the whole piece to find them and then make fiddly time range selections gets to be a bit of a pain for me.

My experience in OS9 was the opposite. It never crashed. Of course, that's because I DID do extension sets and Locations. I worked in DP sometimes for 12 hours a day for weeks on end, and never a crash. I could count all my crashes in Performer/Digital Performer from 1987 up to 2003 on two hands, and those were mostly outside problems. It NEVER failed in performance. Ever.

Starting with DP 4.0, things got very strange. A few versions were very stable, a few were very unstable, but all had weird quirks where not all the features worked correctly. Even 5.11 is not without its quirks. But at least I can work all day in it without a crash.

Not longing for the old days. Just longing for the confidence I used to have in MOTU, Apple, and all their products. When they're good, they're good, but getting them there is quite a trick.

Shooshie

[kassonica]

This is a most interesting thread. I never used Dp before 4.12 I used logic in 9 and i must admit i noticed the difference going from Os 9 to Os X and i think some of the problem has been with Apple.

But even the probs that run with Apple and DP (and i'm still using 4,61 and 10.3.9 Because i can work for weeks without any hassles and it's stable for me) it's down to what you put in and i'm not saying i'm creating gold but I'm damm happy to have these tools even to the point were if all I could get is 8 tracks and 8 plugins i'd be happy up to a point because their better and more affordable tools for the average musician than ever before and that can only be a great thing.

Best

[jgest]

I really don't long for the old days of extension sets and the OMS vs. FreeMIDI wars. DP 3 may have been ridiculously more efficient, but It crashed so much for me that I never got to see that. Since 4.6 it's been one of the most stable apps that I have, and I haven't been able to crash 5 yet. I think that it could still be more efficient, but that doesn't matter if it's not up and running.

After coming to DP from Cubase, I really miss the user defined regions and being able to color any region whatever I want. DP's region handling makes no sense to me and seems very outdated. I've spent most of my life dealing in visual arts, so I like to have visual feedback of what I'm working on. Having to remember where I put the changes or listen through the whole piece to find them and then make fiddly time range selections gets to be a bit of a pain for me.

My experience in OS9 was the opposite. It never crashed. Of course, that's because I DID do extension sets and Locations. I worked in DP sometimes for 12 hours a day for weeks on end, and never a crash. I could count all my crashes in Performer/Digital Performer from 1987 up to 2003 on two hands, and those were mostly outside problems. It NEVER failed in performance. Ever.

Starting with DP 4.0, things got very strange. A few versions were very stable, a few were very unstable, but all had weird quirks where not all the features worked correctly. Even 5.11 is not without its quirks. But at least I can work all day in it without a crash.

Not longing for the old days. Just longing for the confidence I used to have in MOTU, Apple, and all their products. When they're good, they're good, but getting them there is quite a trick.

Shooshie

I agree despite the increase in features for dp4+ (and I only got into the game around 2.7) os 9 was just rock solid!

[Saintmatthew]

After coming to DP from Cubase, I really miss the user defined regions and being able to color any region whatever I want.

A couple years ago I filled in at drums for an industrial band for a couple of shows and only had 2 weeks to learn everything. They used a comp running Cubase for extra synth/backing tracks plus a click track and I told'em I could run/monitor it by the kit which they thought was awesome. I took their files and color-coded each section in the song and used these for cues for changes. Still ended up being a nerve wracking affair though.

[Frodo]

I think if we were running the exact same things now that we ran in OS9 with DP 3.11 it would be no less rock solid. This is a mere observation and not a swipe-- based on a fair assessment of how my own usage of DP and the Mac have evolved since then. Where data in MBs were the order of the day, we've now taken on GB as the standard unit of measure.

DP4.x/Jaguar and to some degree Panther were quite worrisome. DP 4.61 under Tiger was quite refreshing, but 5.11 is great-- is the '.11' a coincidence?

There are a couple buggy things with MIDI that crop up from time to time, but I've not been able to nail this down to DP specifically or to Core MIDI. But for the most part, anything I could suggest for a new DP would have less to do with stability and more to do with convenience features. Most of all, I would like to know more about the past, present, and future of MAS with limited or dwindling third-party support available these days. But as long as DP works and as long as we have AU options, then all should be fine-- (yes?).