[Ardour-Dev] Ardour interface simplication?

[Adam Dingle]

  On 09/23/2010 09:51 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> [snip]
> In general, creating basic/advanced UIs for same application is
> considered a no-go in usability. Every application has its target
> audience, for which the UI should be streamlined. We are lucky to have
> Audacity, Jokosher and Fillmore for less experienced users, are we
> not? :)

The problem is that none of those applications remotely approach a 
GarageBand-like feature set.  None of them support MIDI 
recording/editing, for instance.  Audacity feels more like a waveform 
editor than a digital audio workstation to me - it doesn't seem like the 
right interface for someone who wants to casually record a few audio 
and/or MIDI tracks and do some basic editing.  And Jokosher and Fillmore 
are still missing lots of important features like LV2 support and the 
ability to cycle a region, divide songs into sections or apply reverb to 
a master track, for instance.

If you're curious, check out the (very incomplete) feature matrix where 
I track features of some of these programs at

http://trac.yorba.org/wiki/AudioEditorComparison

I'm glad you mentioned Fillmore since I'm actually the founder of Yorba, 
the open source group that develops Fillmore.  Our goal is exactly this: 
a usable GNOME audio editor that feels more like GarageBand than Pro 
Tools.  Recently I've been questioning whether it makes sense to build 
up this functionality from scratch (we're using GStreamer) or whether 
instead we should just make a simplified Ardour interface, since Ardour 
has most (though not all) of the features we want.  We could conceivably 
either hide features in the existing Ardour interface (as I suggested) 
or write a new GUI on top of the Ardour back end.

adam