[Ardour-Users] Hm...

[John Emmas]

On 30 Aug 2010, at 20:15, Paul Davis wrote:

> 
> I could spend time going over every single point you raise. But I've
> spent time doing that over the last 10 years, because your observatons
> are not new. Every thing you bring up has some element of truth and
> sense to it, and they all represent design decisions that we've had
> visit and revisit over time. But everything you bring up also comes
> with a heavy dose of expectation on your part about what the workflow
> looks like. 
> 


David - to add to what Paul said, I've used a wide range of DAWs (and even designed a couple of them) but whilst I sympathise with your problem, you need to be realistic.  No two DAWs on the market today either work the same way or use exactly the same terminology.  And the reason is a simple one....  nonlinear editing is a very young technology.  It's not at all like word processing where the basic terminology (words, lines, sentences, paragraphs, linefeeds, fonts, cutting & pasting etc) has been around for centuries, gets taught in schools and is (mostly) well understood.  Everyone knows what a bold font looks like, or what wraparound is, or what page breaks are etc.  And whilst word processors get used in many different fields, their users are essentially all doing the same thing.

DAWs on the other hand have grown up very recently and have had to invent their terminology as they went along.  'Clips' in one system are called 'regions' in another system or 'events' in yet another system.  There's no consensus yet about what things should be called or how the UI elements should interact with the user.  There isn't even a common consensus about what nonlinear editors should do.  The requirements of a film editor are a whole world apart from the requirements of a musician.  Every system takes a different approach so naturally, this leaves all DAWs with a steep learning curve.  It's not like text editing where using one editor pretty much prepares you for all the others.  With DAWs, you'll only give back as much as you're prepared to invest in the learning process and you shouldn't assume that any system will work any particular way - nor that it will work like any other.

A day might come when all that changes but it hasn't arrived yet.

John