@Zynewave wrote:
Btw. I’ve modified the default track coloring slightly in the new beta14, and specified a new default track color. Let me know if the new default colors present problems.
I only did a quick test – is it correct that default track color is not applied to colorless tracks anymore when you save a project? That’s the reason I never used it in the first place, as it quickly became a mess, but it looks like it has been fixed already somewhere along the way…?
There’s also a little extra space on the right side of the track headers, even when you disable vertical meters and the color bar. It’s more apparent now with the selection frame – it looks a bit strange that it doesn’t cover the whole header.
You mean the space for the horizontal drag bar? Clicking this will not select the track, so I think it would be wrong to extend the focus frame onto this bar.
Ah! Since it so distinctly looks like part of the track I assumed it was separate from the drag-handle. You’re right I never tried to select a track there.
If 2.23 is finished, it’d be great if you could take a look at the real-time bounce issue mentioned here: http://www.zynewave.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=15899#15899. With beta 12 and the new signal chain layout it seems Ctrl-H is gone, and so it’s become impossible to unhide effect tracks so you can insert an empty event to record in manually.
I have a link to that post, and I’ll get back to that eventually. Probably not going to make it into 2.23. As a consequence, in beta14 I have put the “Hide track lane” option back into the selector menus. Eventually I’ll remove the hide track lane option entirely, but only once I get the realtime bounce mended, and fixed some issues with track copy/paste.
Understood! This is also good since I (and I presume others too) still have a handful of old projects that have lots of unhidden tracks. Now they can at least still be “converted.”
From what I can tell, these are the problems I’ve found that made it as far as beta 14:
– Slider value pop-ups become stuck when changing profiles or closing the inspector with shortcut keys.
– The bypass buttons on the selectors do not update to a newly selected mute color until the UI is refreshed.
– If you open the mixer and then select a track in the arrangement view, the mixer strip uses the active selection font color instead of the inactive one.
– Sometimes, the group expand/collapse button will ignore the track color and be colored with the panel background color instead.
– When you’re dragging a device to a track, the selector button’s pop-up help gets a little in the way as it blocks the view of the chain.
– When you drag-and-drop an instrument to a track in a particular way, the “drop here” box overlay on the track becomes stuck. You can even ride it up and down using the scroll-wheel. Yee-ha! 😆
Here’s a GIF animation:
@thcilnnahoj wrote:
– Track headers don’t always show the same elements even if they’re supposedly the same height after using the ‘set default track height’ option.
It seems this happens because there’s a larger space between selector buttons and the faders when there’s an effect added to the chain.
Here are two tracks – only the second one has effects on it.
On the top row, they’re both at the smallest possible size where you can still see everything except the effect chain. On the bottom row, the additional space is easily visible after setting track size so that you get to see the controls on the second track too.
There’s also a little extra space on the right side of the track headers, even when you disable vertical meters and the color bar. It’s more apparent now with the selection frame – it looks a bit strange that it doesn’t cover the whole header.
Can’t say much about beta 13 other than it looks great! 🙂
Hmm, you’ve been here as long as me, so I feel a little silly for telling you the basics. Excuse me if you know all this already. 😳
The way Malcolm suggested works fine for linear fades. If you need a non-linear fade, the easiest way is to use spline points. You can select which type of points to draw from the three buttons on the left side of the curve/automtion editor. Here’s an example with two points.
If you like it better to record level fader movement, and just smooth out the curve afterwards, then try this: First, here’s a curve I’ve recorded.
Open the automation event in the editor, select all points (Ctrl-A or click-drag over them) and choose ‘convert to spline curve’ from the edit menu. As long as the recorded curve is not too wobbly, there shouldn’t be as many points left now. You can move the remaining ones around a little to smoothen the curve and end up with something like this. Or change it drastically from what was originally recorded, of course.
@Zynewave wrote:
Sure. Probably coming in 2.24.
Otherwise known as Podium 4.0! =P~
@Zynewave wrote:
– I think the ‘default track color’ setting is ready to be retired. With the default opacity settings, it messes everything up if you select anything but shades of grey.
Can you clarify?
Um, I’ll try, but I can’t guarantee that my explanation will make sense to you! 😆
For reference, example 1 has 2.23’s default color settings: overall color opacity 100%, track background opacity 20%, some random track colors and no default track color assigned.
Before 2.23, you could select a default color and still override it when you set per-track colors, provided you set opacity to 100%.
Now, the strips are always colored, even if you set rack/header/strip opacity to 0. Even on higher opacity levels you don’t override the default track color but can only add various track colors to it instead. So you have a choice between all track backgrounds being pretty much shades of the same color (ex. 2, low opacity) or getting a real color mix (ex. 3, high opacity), like in previous versions, but coloring the whole strip this time. All in all very bright compared to the default settings. (Edit: It can of course be dark as well – I meant to say it’s quite intense.)
Setting the default color to a shade of grey is a little more useful, as you can make tracks appear generally brighter or darker, if moderately applied. (Edit: Sorry, this is of course not correct. It can be achieved by setting a lighter or darker shade of the panel background color! It’s just that I always use grey…) 😉
I’ve never used it before, but here goes:
1. Import Proteus VX into the project and locate it in the devices list on the the right side of the project page.
2. Right-click on it and select New Multitimbral Instance – this will create a folder with 16 MIDI mappings and one stereo output.
3. In this folder, find the output mapping (should be the topmost one), right-click it and select New Copy.
4. In the window that opens up, the bottom right corner holds what you need: the mixer input (plugin output) setting. You already have a mapping with channels 1+2, so here you must set the first channel to 3, assuming you want all outputs to be stereo. Click OK, and repeat this step for as many outputs as you need, always increasing the mixer input channel numbers. You can also change all of the resulting device mappings’ names to e.g., “Proteus VX (#1) Outputs 1+2” so you won’t confuse them.
5. Assuming you only ever want to use it as a multitimbral instrument, you can delete the original Proteus device from the devices list.
You should now have something like this:
Tip: Should you ever need a second Proteus instance with similar mappings, just right-click the folder and select New Instance. Podium should set up everything correctly by itself.
Next comes the configuration of Proteus itself:
1. In Proteus’ editor window, go to Options -> Preferences, and on the Audio page, select the appropriate number of output busses (in the bottom left corner).
2. Switch from the “SINGLE” to the “1-16” tab on the left and to the “OUTS” tab on the right.
3. Now you can configure which instruments should go to which outputs:
Afterwards, it’s just a matter of setting up your tracks in a comfortable way.
In this example, I’ve grouped all audio outputs and set the group track to Automatic Solo, so I won’t have to hunt the right output channel whenever I solo one of the MIDI tracks. 🙂
Hope this helps! If you need anything more, just say so.
@Zynewave wrote:
Adjusted the shadow effect on the slider grooves.
Looking much better! Thank you very much.
I thought it important that sends are aligned, so that you can easily glance along horizontally to see how how much each track is sending to for example “Send 1”. Since sends are mostly placed as the last element in a chain, this requires that the chains are aligned to the top. I’m wondering if it would be a good idea to split the chain up, so that sends are aligned to the top, and effects to the bottom. :-k
This split would of couse not be done on chains where you place sends between effects.
That’s actually all I meant to say – the suggested idea has normal effects building up like a tower at the bottom (maybe with a tiny gap between them and the source selector), and sends can stay fixed up top (if they indeed are the last links in the chain).
I don’t think this would mess up the hiararchical view of the signal flow. Even now, send tracks with Podium’s bus mappings are distinctly separate from, e.g. side-chain sends, at least while you have the + effect buttons visible.
@LiquidProj3ct wrote:
I think this is important, that’s the reason that i’m mastering MS paint 😀
Nice mockup – mastering indeed!
I hope this (MS Paint) is just a joke, though. 😉 If not, you should try the GIMP (http://www.gimp.org / http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net) sometime!
@Zynewave wrote:
Unfortunately this behaviour is not very “touch screen” friendly. I’m not saying I’m going to change the entire Podium UI to focus on touch screen support, but I do think that touch screen operation will become more prominent in the future. So I keep that in mind when I design UI behaviour. Pressing on a touch screen will perform a click, and so you don’t have the usual mouse cursor you can move over controls to reveal more options.
Interesting! I don’t know anything about the subject – I imagined they’d have a way to recognize fingers hovering above, like graphics tablets do… just without a pen. So, would the “finger size” setting you mentioned resize buttons, mostly, or make the whole mixer absolutely huge? I can’t imagine it to be much fun to hunt buttons as tiny as they are now (and I have small hands).
@LiquidProj3ct wrote:
– Please, allow copy/move fx between mixer strips
Agreed! Making copies would be nice – with the ctrl key maybe, just like you do with arrangement items.
– I think it’s strange that effect chains are drawn in two different places depending on whether there’s a send track at the top of the chain. In my opinion it would be better if they were always placed in the same spot, and effect tracks would start to appear from bottom to top instead, like on track 1, no matter if there are send tracks already. When there are no effects, the + button would be placed just where the first effect track appears.
It would also fit the hierachy better if the chain was built bottom-up as opposed to the new effects being stacked on top pushing the others down. This also ensures that the group level of effect tracks is easily visible across all mixer strips.
– The last thing that’s kind of missing now would be drag-rearranging of tracks in the mixer. It looks like moving tracks, especially to and from groups would be much simpler with the layout of the mixer. It is a little confusing sometimes in the tracklist, but I think the new way you proposed to display the group level there would help with that, too.
A few quick comments before I go to bed:
– The selection frame’s a little awkward at first, but soon feels right and looks very nice. The SMR buttons and the mixing grid being overlapped skews the picture, though.
– Separation lines on track headers are great, as are the transparant volume faders! 8)
– Tiny selectors on track headers, hmm… I haven’t found a device with a name that takes more than half of the available space. Also the lack of bypass buttons – there’s more than enough room, I think. Like this, the only way for newcomers trying Podium for the first time (meaning no knowledge of keyboard shortcuts or mixer options) using the default setup to bypass a plug-in is in the rack panel. But maybe this is just a far-fetched example.
– The whole upper half of horizontal fader grooves is drowned in shadows, making it unnecessarily hard to see the coloring, which is such a nice feature. 🙁
– I like the non-shadowy look of the vertical fader grooves, but as I said before it looks blurry on dark background. I also wouldn’t mind them being even a little wider still.
Here’s another way to display bypass buttons I believe worth mentioning (used in Fabfilter plug-ins). The control’s not (just) a selector like in Podium, but the principle can be applied to those as well. Just disregard the level bar, +/- and X buttons on the sides.
1. Control in its normal state. (If you move the mouse on it you can adjust the level)
2. Mouse hovering over left edge of control – it turns into a little power button.
3. Control in bypassed state, without the mouse hovering over it.
Podium’s bypass X button could, for example, appear as soon as the mouse cursor is moved anywhere on a selector button, like saying “Hi! If you want to bypass this thing, I’m over here. Otherwise just click anywhere else to open the editor.”
