thcilnnahoj's Forum Page

@Zynewave wrote:

– Enabling bouncing on a track doesn’t show the B button on the mixer strip, so you can’t see its state there.

The new Bounce button in the effect chain should show the bounce state. Unless the effect chain is hidden, the redundant B button is hidden to save vertical space. Isn’t it enough with the bounce indicator in the effect chain?

Hmm, I guess, though it’s not as clear that a track is configured for bouncing when the only indication is an effects slot, compared to the aligned B buttons. You also can’t use key shortcuts the bounce selectors, it seems. Edit: Missed the post about the bypass buttons. I usually don’t use them, though…

@swindus wrote:

Alt+Click could delete the previous bounce file. Sometimes I want just bounce a part (Alt+B) of a track again and after one complete bounce the partial bounce does not work for me, the complete track is always bounced when using Alt+B. Or is there anything I’m doing wrong here?

It’s working as expected over here… Are you sure you set a punch range before pressing Alt+B?

I did a little stress test now – even at 95+% CPU use (according to Windows task manager), moving windows like a madman and opening dropdown menus didn’t stop the GUI from updating (apart from the hickups mentioned in the above post). The meters went out of sync with playback, but the play cursor bravely kept up.

Other things:

– The right-click menus on the loop/punch/etc. regions now show options for all regions. Intentional, I assume.

– The name of sequences is pushed downwards as you increase global button size. Probably also intentional, so that it’s centered on minimized strips?

– With the round corners gone on selector buttons, it has become even harder to see the line when you’re dragging effects with some color schemes. It seems the color of the line changes automatically depending on the panel background color…

Comparison (my theme, Nightfall, Paper):

Maybe it could be drawn on top of selectors?

– (Not related to 2.36) Likewise, the color of the event resize overlay box thing (you know what I mean) is also chosen depending on some background color, making it very hard to see sometimes. The move and time-stretch overlays are always black, it seems, which works much better for me.

– (Not related to 2.36) With the select tool, left-clicking shortly after selecting a menu option that closes the right-click menu results in an event being added. Looks like Podium sees it as the second click of a double-click for some reason. This happens sometimes because I often just click somewhere to deselect events.

Yeah, sorry, many chapters in the guide are outdated at the moment, but it’s being worked on!

Some extra information:

Level automation controls an offset applied to the track’s level, so if you have the track level set to -inf, you can’t bring the level up from that by using automation.

Also, you actually don’t need to arm parameter tracks for recording – adjustments to faders on parameter tracks are always recorded.

Oh, and if you ever need to automate post-fx level (or anywhere in the effect chain), you can do that by right-clicking an effect and selecting the automate parameter menu option from there.

Beta 5 is nice – those slider knobs can get really tiny! 😮

Random thoughts and observations:
– It’s good that you restored the dimmed so/in labels. However, they disappear awfully early during zooming. I think that even at the smallest strip size, at least labels like “So” and “In” would make them more discernable and an easier target.

– Since the divider line is back on track headers, any chance of it reappearing in the mixer?

– I’m not sure that completely removing the space between strips is such a good idea… I would contest that Podium has the smallest actually usable mixer strips of all sequencers now (don’t quote me on it!), and it’s enough to fit a lot of them on screen. A tiny little bit of visual separation can’t hurt.

– Forgive me for asking, since I can see that it makes more sense, but isn’t Shift+scroll pretty much a standard shortcut for horizontal scrolling in most other programs?

What I meant about the scrollbars is that they fit in with the ‘old’ round design, which I still prefer, and not as much with the new. Like I said, I think that mixing design styles (round buttons here, sharp corners there, and suddenly rounded corners again on the track headers over yonder) is undesirable. Still, you’re the professional designer (or should I say wizard!) here, so I’ll shut up. 😛
I want to apologize again if any of my ramblings ever so slightly upset you. I also see your point about keeping scrollbar size separate.

Problems:
– It’s impossible to use Shift+Alt+click to set automatic solo in the mixer now, due to the hand tool shortcut. By the way, something that’s always irked me is that automatic solo is disabled when you enable normal solo mode on top of it… the two should be unrelated, in my opinion. Muting should of course mute the track, but restore automatic solo again afterwards. Anyone disagree?

– If you choose “control type: dial”, the pan dials are a little too big for the smallest possible strips. Also, would it be possible to split the control type used in the chain panel and for the pan control, and make the dial centered when zooming out? I think I would like to try using dials for panning again, though I’m not a hundred percent sure I will. It’s probably not worth the effort if nobody else thinks the same.

– I think the control type and gain/pan fader options are quite confusing, and some of them possibly obsolete. Examples: Selecting “disable” for the faders doesn’t really disable them, but shows them inside the chain panel instead. For gain/pan controls, “show value on knob” can’t be properly used anymore with smaller strips.

Suggestions:
– If double-clicking the zoom slider resets strip zoom, maybe double-clicking it again could return to the previous level (like with the navigator).

– Make horizontal scrolling snap to mixer strips – it’s a long standing request that sounds very reasonable. I’d prefer it as an option, though, as I’m not sure I would use it myself. 🙂

– An ambitious one: Ideally I would suggest a small and really simple navigator (at best just colored bars) in the mixer to replace the scroll bar and zoom slider. It’d give a nice overview and the possibility to jump straight to a specific section (if you don’t always use track tags for housekeeping).

– I think that the mixer zoom setting should be saved with each arrangement instead of the editor profile. I’d actually say the same goes for the minimize audio/MIDI/parameter tracks options.
Zoom settings for all editors except arrangement are also stored per profile – it makes more sense there, but not so much with the mixer, in my opinion.

I’d say it’s definitely related to latency-producing plug-ins, then. Allow me to bump this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PBYJj9psos

I’ve also had it mess up the timing instead of dropping the sound completely sometimes.

Frits, you might want to examine my old Nucleum example project (Podium Universe), where the same thing happens. The kick drum hit at bar 52 is always out of time when bouncing. There’s a zPitch instance on the master track, and removing it fixes the problem.

I’m sorry if I’m getting obnoxious, but I’m not yet sure if I should continue to “fight” (:wink:) or just accept it as is.

Could you give a reason why you separated the color strips from the tracks like this? In my opinion, it just makes it seem like they don’t belong together. Besides, the rounded corners on mini-mixer strips make me think of towers in Islamic architecture. 😉 Also, it looks, um, weird now when you don’t use vertical meters on track headers.

More stuff to nag you:

– Are you going to switch to using rounded corners on most other interface elements, too? Just my opinion, but mixing the two (or even three) styles doesn’t go very well. Also, what about scrollbars?

– Why did you decide to keep button and scrollbar size separate? It would seem natural that they’d be resized together.

– I know it’s still in beta state, but the labels on empty so/in selectors seem to be a mess. There’s normal (non-dimmed) text on them on track headers and the rack now, but none at all in the mixer.

– Without shadows (and text), I find empty selectors to be barely noticeble.

– Having the frame as an option hidden away somewhere seems like an unhappy compromise to me. If you really feel it looks terrible, you should decide on an alternative like, for example, making the buttons just a bit smaller (it makes no difference to me whether I can read “zPE(” or only “zPE” on tiny strips), or use full-colored backgrounds despite what us users say, if you prefer them.

If you would like a little explanation to go with that:

As you’ve noticed, with ‘snap to closest grid line’, clicking inside the left half of the “box” inbetween gridlines snaps the note start to the gridline on the left. Clicking in the right half snaps it to the next gridline on the right.

With ‘snap to previous grid line’, as the name says, clicking anywhere inside a “box” will snap to the line on the left.

So, you can choose whether to (more or less) paint notes on the gridlines, or to paint notes in the “boxes” between gridlines. To me personally, the first option makes more sense in regard to musical notation, but it’s always good to have an option. 😉