Topic: A few small suggestions for improvements

I’ve got a few more ideas to throw at ya. Kudos to you for taking ideas like this so freely from your users BTW. Note that I’ve devided this into two sections, one on suggestions, the other on bugs I’ve found.

Suggestions:
-When you import a midi file, it doesn’t import the names of the tracks from the midi file when it creates the matching tracks and sequences. I’d prefer it if each track, and the sequences in it, were created with the name of the original track in the midi file. Still, it’s also quite useful to know what the track number of something was in the original midi file. Perhaps adding the track number as a prefix or postfix to the name would be a good idea. Even better, add an option for enabling/disabling the prefix in the preferances, and leave it on by default.

-When navigating through tracks in the mixer region using the keyboard, currently, if you press across, it will select the next track in the list, regardless of the level that track is on the heirachy. This can be really annoying. Usually, you want to operate on tracks that are at the same level of the heirachy at one time. When you have a few sequences that have around 8 automation tracks bound to it, it’s a lot of keypresses just to select the next track. I’d like it if when you pressed across, it highlighted the next track on the same level of the heirachy as the track you had selected previously. Seeing as you can move up and down the heirachy with the up and down arrows, this makes sense anyway.

-When you’re working in an arrangement, you can create presets for your VST plugins in the menu on the left. The problem is, you can’t delete them from this menu as far as I can tell. In order to scrap a preset, you have to go back to the project browser, into the appropriate folder, and delete them from there. It would be a lot more convenient if you could delete things like presets from the rightclick menu inside the arrangement editor. Seeing as you can make them from this area, it only makes sence that you be able to delete them from there as well.

-In all areas where you can get scrollbars, it’d be cool if when you drag the mouse while holding the middle mouse button (ie, clicking in the scroll wheel), it scrolls across the window in the direction that you move the mouse. This is a much easier way to move around windows like this when you’re zoomed in.

-It would be very handy if you could select multiple tracks at once. Often if I’m going to delete a track, I want to delete several at once, and it’d be handy to just be able to hold ctrl and select the lot, then delete them all in one hit. Actually, this is related to my next suggestion.

-Currently, when you delete a track that has other tracks as children, the other tracks just get merged in with the children of whatever node comes next up the heirachy. Often, when the track you delete is a sequence, you want to delete all the children of the track too, such as the parameter automation tracks. Currently, you have to delete each child track individually, as well as the parent node. This can get tedious if you want to delete several sequences, all having a few automation tracks applied. There are times however when you don’t want to delete the children of a track along with it, such as when you remove an effect plugin from the heirachy. I suggest that if you try and delete a track that has children, it asks you if you want to delete all the children too, or assign them to the next node up the heirachy.

Bugs:
-Not so much a bug, but I think perhaps an oversight. When importing a midi file, and extracting parameter automation track events, I’ve noticed that often the created automation track does not actually extend all the way to the end of the track it was bound to. It seems to stop the track after the last control point it locates. This is a problem, because after the automation track runs out, the parameter returns to the default value, while with the actual midi file, that parameter would be maintained until it encountered another point. When importing a midi file, the parameter automation tracks should extend all the way to the end of the sequence it is bound to, regardless of the position of the last sequence point.

-When you copy/cut a sequence from one arrangement and insert it into another, it is still bound in someway to the sequence from which it was copied. I encountered this when I decided I wanted to restore a track from the oiginal midi file it came from, so I imported the midi file again to make a new temporary arrangement, copied the track, and dumped it into my modified arrangement. When I deleted the temporary arrangement that I had just made however, the sequence I copied was deleted as well. Even when the arrangement was totally empty of all tracks and events, when I deleted it, the other sequence I had coped into my other arrangement was deleted with it. The only way I could get the sequence to remain was to open up the sequence, copy all the events, and create a new sequence in the arrangement I wanted it in, then dump all the events in. When you insert a sequence from the clipboard, the inserted sequence should be only bound to the arrangement in which it was inserted, not the arrangement in which it was created.

If you want better explinations of anything I’ve said, or examples of what I mean, I’m happy to give them.

If you hold the shift key while pressing left/right arrow, it will behave as you described. If focus is in the tracks region, then pressing page up/down will navigate tracks at the same level.

Cool. I didn’t think of trying key combos in that area.

How about if you delete a group track that is collapsed, it will delete all child tracks as well? You can always use undo, in case you happened to press delete on your collapsed master out track. If the track is not collapsed, it will behave is it does now.

Good idea. That saves the annoying popup box.

Maybe a solution would be to visually emphasize any events in an arrangement that are referencing sequences/sounds outside of the arrangement object. For these events there could then be a context-menu command that would make a local copy of the remote sequence/sound objects.

Yeah, that would be good.