The Top 10 Most Requested Features

[Shooshie]

One more thing regarding window sets vs. Mission Control. I still use Window Sets to position my basic window group. If I accidentally close my Consolidated Window, for example, I don't have to try to remember how to get it all back. I just invoke a window set, and I'm back in business.

Window sets reset you back to your primary working position. Putting those windows in Spaces allows you to let them morph over time into what you need at that moment for that project. They Change as you open plugins around the Mixing Board, for example. Groups of Vienna Symphonic Library interfaces may evolve depending on what instruments you're working on. No reason to have every single one of them open, but you can open, say all the woodwinds, all the brass, or all the strings in one monitor and keep leaping back over to them for reference or changes as you install keyswitches, X-fades, or whatever.

Switching to any space merely moves your current working set of windows front-&-center. The windows in that space are the ones you've been opening and working in. Window Sets cannot bring back what you just recently opened and arranged in the screen. But they CAN bring any setup you may want to fall back upon, in the event that your windows get unruly.

That's why I still have some basic window sets, but I only use them for repositioning windows that get out of place or lost. Mission Control is my way of moving a working group in front of me.

Shooshie

[HobbyCore]

Also, my 'DAW comparison' was simply to help explain why someone may feel that DP's track/sequence views would be redundant and limited.

They are not. You know nothing about the Tracks Overview Window if you think it's just a limited Sequence Editor.

Jeez, folks. Work with me a little. Try it out. Work for a day or two this way, and see if it doesn't suit you better. Try reading and learning about the Tracks Overview Window, too. There are some things about it in the Tips Sheet, though not nearly enough.

You folks who want regions, do you realize that you've GOT regions in the Tracks Overview Window? Do you realize that it works a little like the Song Window? It's got cells, which are a little like chunks that you can arrange. You can move things around VERY quickly. Change resolution, select every other cell, or every 3rd cell, and you've just selected all the downbeats. Or all the 4th beats, or whatever. Slip over to the MIDI Edit Window and grab one of their velocities, then CONTROL-SHIFT-DRAG to proportionately bring up the downbeats for emphasis. Saves you from having to carefully select each one amidst all the other MIDI stuff that's happening. Just click-click-click, and you've selected a complex group or pattern. It's just a matter of visualizing what's in the tracks, then carefully adjusting the window resolution to fit it.

In the Tracks Overview Window you can instantly drag a region to a scratch track for further isolation from the rest of the track. There, you can mute it, edit it, change it's output channel, or any of a thousand other operations. Done? Drag it right back into its mother track.

I could come up with a thousand more examples, but at some point you just have to try it and learn how to use it, how to incorporate it into your workflow so that YOU come up with the scenarios for the Tracks Overview Window and how it's used.

Shooshie

The point is that in other software, you can do these things without having to switch views.

That is where the idea that TO/sequence are limited or redundant come from. I'm simply trying to explain to you why someone may think that. I am not asserting this as fact, though I have begun to share this frustration myself recently. Earlier, I even gave a generalized example of why splitting the 2 views makes sense from a design perspective.

I'm simply trying to help the OP, since nobody else here seems to understand what the issue with having 2 views is. There's lots of good information here, and I've even learned something useful, but it's missing the mark for the topic that was being addressed in reply.

[Shooshie]

The point is that in other software, you can do these things without having to switch views.

That is where the idea that TO/sequence are limited or redundant come from. I'm simply trying to explain to you why someone may think that. I am not asserting this as fact, though I have begun to share this frustration myself recently. Earlier, I even gave a generalized example of why splitting the 2 views makes sense from a design perspective.

I'm simply trying to help the OP, since nobody else here seems to understand what the issue with having 2 views is. There's lots of good information here, and I've even learned something useful, but it's missing the mark for the topic that was being addressed in reply.

We may be missing the mark, but the conversation has evolved, and when there is a misunderstanding about the Tracks Overview window, I feel duty-bound to correct it. I'm a pro with 28 years of experience with this software, and one of the things I understand deeply from that experience is how important the TO window is, and how it's different from any other DAW that I've seen. You say you can "do that" in other DAWs in one window, but I say no. You can't. They don't have this window. You haven't demonstrated an understanding of what it does, so why would you make that claim?

People who work 100% in audio may not find it as interesting as I do, but people who use MIDI AND audio (or just MIDI) should wake up and smell the tracks. The TOW is sort of your nerve center. The central dispatching and control station. It's also where you can do a lot of arranging quickly, trying out things, changing things, without having to go deep.

One of the keys to working in any DAW is knowing what your tools are, and instantly assessing which tools to grab. It's typical for people to ignore the TO window while learning to do that, and that leaves them at a disadvantage. I say get to know it. I can't tell you how many hundreds, if not thousands of times I've done serious re-arranging in the TOW without even opening an edit window.

Shooshie

[HobbyCore]

I'm simply trying to explain that/why someone new to DP may find the TOW unnecessary.

I am not making that claim, but I do understand why someone would feel that way when coming from another program.

Please understand that I'm trying to help folks understand where bongo_x is coming from, not trying to espouse this view as fact.

[Shooshie]

I'm simply trying to explain that/why someone new to DP may find the TOW unnecessary.

I am not making that claim, but I do understand why someone would feel that way when coming from another program.

Please understand that I'm trying to help folks understand where bongo_x is coming from, not trying to espouse this view as fact.

Bongo's an old hand. DP is his 2nd axe, not his lead, so I don't expect him to know all the tricks. He gets what he wants out of it, and that's fine.

New users may be intimidated by the Tracks Overview Window, and I get that. It's easy to ignore it, but you'll always be asking for things in DP, not knowing that they (and more) are already there. If you're new, you need to learn the DAW, and the TOW is an essential tool if you're going to go advanced. It's also a great tool for simple things that you don't want to spend a lot of time selecting and carefully cutting/pasting to the right location. This was the original "arranging" window. It was sort of our "graphic" window in the early days, and it was welcomed with excitement. You learned to work blind, because you could not directly see what you were working with, but knowing the beats and subdivisions of those beats, and knowing if you tended to track early, late, or all over the map taught you to choose certain resolutions, then move cells that you knew contained what you wanted.

Now, we can actually see the data in the cells. Tiny, yes, but visible. You can select details in another window, come to the TOW, and start moving it around quickly without worry about where it's going, because it'll always land in the same relative position wherever you drag it. This is where you learn about range selecting.

There are three mouse positions that enable different kinds of selections in the TOW. Grab the middle of any cell, and you'll just drag that cell as a MIDI object to wherever you want it. Grab an empty cell and drag into data, and you can range-select that data in large blocks. Grab at the very top of a cell, and you can range-select whatever you want in the track without moving it.

If you don't know about those three mouse positions, you're not really using the TOW. You can also use the I-Beam (hold down the I key, or tap it twice) to drag through a single track. Add the command key and you can turn off the grid and get exactly what you want.

There... I've tripled your knowledge about the TOW in three short paragraphs. Start enjoying what I've given you. There's more.

Shooshie

[frankf]

Even though I work mostly with the SE, I'm with you on the TO. It gives me, well the overview of the sequence chunk not the micro view of the SE. Folders really shine and make sense in the TO and the TO is where I make gross edits like copying 8 bars and pasting them elsewhere in the sequence or to the clipping window. You've written a lot valuable posts on what's possible in the TO. And I like that it's clean and not incorporated into the SE or GE windows. You can make the SE almost like the TO by showing all tracks and adjust their heights to Tiny.


Frank Ferrucci

[Shooshie]

Thanks, Frank. One more thing I should add, since we're here talking about the TOW, is to set the Region Parsing for your song. If you're working in 8 bar phrases, set it to parse phrases longer than 8 bars in 8 bar phrases, or 4 bar phrases, if you tend to have a distinct statement/answer style of writing. That way, an 8-bar phrase will have one or two regions. It will divide regions into however many bars you want, but that one setting can change things a lot. Sometimes I set it for "one" bar, which makes my regions a bar each. At least those regions that it judges to be longer than 8 bars.

Twelve bar blues may break naturally into 6 bars or three 4-bar phrases. Just learn how it's setting things, and be sure to make your life easier by controlling the length of the section and the length of the phrases it parses to.

That's a little odd-thinking, but it's actually kind of effective once you learn it.

Shooshie

[Todzilla]

Simplify Multi-track Audio Quantizing.

Way too complicated currently.

[Shooshie]

Simplify Multi-track Audio Quantizing.

Way too complicated currently.

Any suggestions for how that should work? I never really thought about that before, so if you have anything in mind, I'd like to know.

Shooshie

[Killahurts]

Simplify Multi-track Audio Quantizing.

Way too complicated currently.

Any suggestions for how that should work? I never really thought about that before, so if you have anything in mind, I'd like to know.

Shooshie

I do- You select the tracks in the tracks overview you want to quantize, press Command 0, select your quantization factor, and press "OK".

Should never be any harder than that.

[billf]

I'm simply trying to explain that/why someone new to DP may find the TOW unnecessary.

New users may be intimidated by the Tracks Overview Window, and I get that. It's easy to ignore it, but you'll always be asking for things in DP, not knowing that they (and more) are already there. If you're new, you need to learn the DAW, and the TOW is an essential tool if you're going to go advanced.

To each their own, but one thing I love about DP is the Tracks Overview. For all of my projects, that window is command central.

[James Steele]

Same here. TOV is indispensable to me.

[Killahurts]

I work in it more than any other window.

[Shooshie]

Well, the largest amount of time, for me, is spent in the MIDI Editor and the Sequence Editor (depending on whether I'm working MIDI or audio), and the Mixing Board when I'm in that phase of things, but I do a LOT of things in the Tracks Overview Window. It's like punctuation; every sentence has it, but it's not the main course, and yet your sentences would be nonsense without it.

Then there are times when I work in the TOW with the same intensity that I find in the MIDI Editor or Sequence Editor. Some tasks are just a perfect fit for it; it's tailored for certain kinds of broad, sweeping edits that are actually harder to do in the other editors, because they lose their resolution when you zoom out, but the TOW is less about resolution and more about regions.

In a sense, the TOW is our region editor. That's one reason I've never seen much need for doing regions elsewhere in DP, where I want individual notes and events to move independently by way of selection. We have our regions in the TOW, and there you can move them around quickly and easily, occasionally having to clean up overlapping controllers or something — which happens in any app that includes region editing, btw. You can let DP judge when to break a region, but you help it out by determining the maximum length of a region. For me that's usually 8 bars (but it can vary a lot), and I get that by setting the preferences to break phrases over 8 bars into 8 bar phrases. You can get a lot of flexibility with the way it allows you to set it up.

Also, I think people forget that you can hold down the COMMAND key to override the grid, which can help with selections in the TOW when you don't want the entire cell. Then there are the different ways of selecting a cell, and the different types of selections:
• Cell(s)
• Region(s)
• Range(s)
• Event(s)

But I suppose I'm repeating myself (again). It's just that so many people report that they rarely ever look at the Tracks Overview Window, and if that's true, it's not surprising that so many people think DP is incomplete. You've got to use the complete program to judge its weaknesses. I realize that DP's learning curve is slow to flatten out, but that's no excuse to stop learning!

Shooshie

[Michael Canavan]

I mentioned this years ago and haven't been around to push the idea:

If DP could provide a "tunnel" through / around the MAS for a single, "floating" channel (mono or stereo), determined by which VI the currently record-enabled MIDI track is routed to, one could conceivably maintain, say, a 512 or 1024 buffer for the duration of the project.

Live does this, the record enabled plug in can have it's own buffer setting. This is also the first thing tech support asks you to uncheck in preferences if you call them with issues. Doesn't mean I don't think it's a great feature, just it must be some seriously hard code.