[Ardour-Dev] Feedback

[Juhana Sadeharju]

Hello. I'm first time Ardour user. Here are some quick notes
I made withing a few hours of testing. I have not read any manuals
because there was no any in Ubuntu. (And I don't have Internet
connection.)

Juhana

ardour: Track could display how many channels it has. I have mono
sample which goes only to left channel in stereo track, and to
both output channels when it is in mono track.
Can these default track/output cabling configurations be changed?

ardour: Rearrangement of the tracks? Now for unknown reason
the master track rearranged from top to bottom. I have now 16
tracks stereo at top and 8 mono tracks at bottom. I may want
want rearrange the tracks.

ardour: Regions window could display the clips visually by region
length. The sample set contains samples for three songs with different
beat each. I'm probably doing the right thing when I now test and
group the samples in this sessions, then rename the files, and
then start a new sessions. But a visualization possibility of the
samples never make Ardour worse.

ardour: In Rosegarden, I used muted tracks as sample storage.
It could be better: (1) Two simultaneous sessions: one for remix,
one for samples. Grab&drag should be possible between sessions.
(2) All samples in the sample session should be locked so that
I won't be able to remove the samples.

ardour: When I take regions to tracks, the region window could show
how many copies are in the tracks. Specially now I want just exactly
one copy of each and no misses.

ardour: How to vertically minimize all tracks?

ardour: Multiple pages? Now all tracks are in one sheet. Multiple
pages would help. Tab-pages perhaps. Each page would have its own
set of tracks. Sometimes it is useful to have the same view in
multiple pages (when the same arrangement is just divided to
multiple pages) and sometimes not to have same view (when the second
page is used as sample clipboard, or when second page contains submix
which is shown as a region in the first page). The vertical "zoom"
is not that important in this context as is the time-zoom.

ardour: A region has simple envelope (up,sustain,down). When I shorten
the region, release mouse button, and then lengthen the region back,
the envelope has changed.
Solution: The shortening should stop when the slope angles are about
to change.
Note: Perhaps region related undo. Perhaps I should copy the region
before shortening that much. These are not as nice as the suggested
solution.

ardour: A shortened a region to minimum, and I'm now unable to
lengthen it at all. The region is just a vertical line.
Note: Temporary zoom-in helped, but this is not nice solution.

ardour: When importing audiofiles to region list, I get errors:
ERROR]: Import: cannot open input sound file
These files goes ok when I take a second attempt to load them.
The problem is not the files, that is sure.
Note: Ardour opens a window for each individual file. The screen
goes wild when 100 windows comes and go in rapit fashion.
The cancel button is totally useless. I simply have to wait
until this mad import has been finished. And what would the cancel
button cancel? Only one soundfile? More useful would be to cancel
the whole import process (as much as 100 soundfiles).
Suggestion: Make only one import window with cancel button.
Quit importing the rest of the files when the cancel button has
been pressed.