A Rant About Take Lanes

I have found 1 major advantage to having take lanes. Make dang sure you get the take right the first time so you don't have to use take lanes.

Other than that, they are not an improvement over layers imho.

I have to admit I'm not liking the take lanes as well as I thought I would.  I think the development effort would have been better spent improving layers.  There are good aspects to lanes, but those same things could have been done in the existing layers method.

Dan

I had to just stop using the take lanes all together ....... You can't get the one your using as the visual one on top when lanes are hidden or collapsed ...  When I record muli takes they mostly lay on top of each other instead of going to new lanes . even if I add one and even arm that one it will lay on top of previous takes ,,,,,, I am not happy with those new take lanes . I gave it a good chance .

Yep!  That is funny.

I was excited about both the layers and take lanes in X2 when I got into Sonar, but I quickly found that once you're done splicing things together it has taken more time than just recording it perfectly in one take.

I should have known, because it's always been the same way in the studio, if the take is not perfect, it's a do over, no mercy. Next time maybe you'll spend more time practicing your parts

I'm okay with the take lanes meself, and love the automation lanes to bits (yeah, I know they're different). 

Perhaps it would have been nice for there to be a preferences option so that we could use layers or lanes? I wonder if they could still do this?

yorolpal - you'll probably find the new lanes extremely useful.  They Layers gave us a lot of capabilities that many of us integrated into our workflow.  In X2 some of these capabilities that were integral to our work flow were "taken away".  If you never used lanes before you won't miss anything.

I gotta agree with the OP here. I really try to avoid speaking in hyperbole here (I've never really had a head for foreign tongues), so I'm not going to go on a rant, but the lanes implementation really does need fixing. The random inserting of lanes labeled T0, the vertical size limits and inability to determine which clip is on top when collapsed, the fact that they don't collapse when the parent track is minimized (probably not a bug, just something I'd like to see)....yeesh. They are a difficult feature to love.

BTW, I always enjoy your rhetorical style Ol' Pal. I keep expecting you to someday preface a post with "I'm just a humble country lawy...uh...sound engineer...". I know it's almost certainly wildly inaccurate, but in my head you've sort of become Matlock with a mixing desk 

Dean

Alright... so yeah, there's lots of weird stuff about lanes that kind of bug me but I do find them better in the sense that they are just easier for me to work with than lanes. Layers would get so tiny after a while that they were no longer editable. If they had just made it so that you could scroll through them and continue to stretch out the track that wouldn't have been a problem but the track would lock into place and you couldn't do anything about it.

Personally I like the new mute/solo buttons however I wish they had made it so you could solo multiple takes like you can with tracks. Seems odd they did it that way but I think I know why. The takes when played together seem to screw up the sound... like badly. It's like the waves are fighting each other and the result sounds like crap. I have given up using them to comp because of this even for fading in and out of clips. Instead after I have the takes I want I toss the take into a new track and blend them that way. Well... I do a little more than that.

This is how I've been doing my solos....

First I'll record a bunch of takes for each individual part. I'll ctrl+z anything that I know right away is crap but if I get close I'll mute it and keep recording takes until I have fairly large pool of takes to choose from. I do this for each section so I end up with dozens of lanes. For this reason I'd like it if they made it so you can hide takes. I don't need to see all takes for all sections at once and after you get a certain amount of takes you can no longer see the track controls so having to scroll up to get at them is annoying.

After I've got a good pool of takes to choose from I'll listen back to them one at a time and make notes on each take about their strengths, wekness, which other elements in the project they work best with and what tweaks need to be done (the notes section is AWESOME IMO... don't know how I lived without it). I'll compare everything and widdle it all down to the best takes then write "Final" on the ones I choose (sometimes I can't decide so I'll write Final on a few different takes and choose when I'm mixing). This takes a little while but it's worth it and far easier than having to try to remember what's what or renaming the actual clips which get truncated anyway so you can go into too much detail. It also doesn't force me to make decisions right away when I don't have a full idea of how everything is going to work out.

Then because as I said the takes don't like to play well with each other sonically I'll clone the parent track and delete all the takes except the ones that contain "Final" take(s) of the section I want and name it accordingly. I also make sure the track is labeled Final or Mix or something to differentiate it from the original track which eventually gets hidden and just becomes my pool so if I decide I want to take another look at some of the other takes I can. I repeat this process for each section until every part has it's own track.

Now this is where it becomes a pain. I don't necessarily want to link the tracks in case I want to adjust their levels or effects differently but obviously I want them to be at least in the same ballpark. So what I end up doing is while I'm mixing I'll copy then mute the original effects on the first section that I used to track with and then tweak the second instance(s) to my liking then copy that over to the tracks of the following sections (and mute their original effects... I keep the original instances there so I can a/b between the two). I try to avoid doing any complex adjustments to the Pro Channel setting because I haven't quite learned how to save those settings and copy them to other tracks so instead I opt to do my Pro Channel stuff on the buss so it's applied to everything.

Quite the ordeal n'est ce pas?

What I would like to see happen is that sonic fighting between the lanes get eliminated so I can keep all the takes in the same track and then have a little volume knob on the takes so I can easily adjust their levels without screwing around with envelopes. If I need to get into the effects I can just do it on a clip per clip basis (that's a pretty cool feature). If they did it this way it would save me a ton of time.

All in all takes are cool but they need some improvements. If they were just a little bit more like tracks (like with a volume knob) and they blended properly then I'd be pretty happy.

Yes... I know. I may be a little insane. Cheers.

Bring back Layers.
Lanes are one step forward, two steps back.

Keni... Couldn't you just use X1 to track and edit then open the project in X2 to get at the new tools for mixing and effects?

Another feature I'd like to see added (and maybe it's already there but I haven't seen it) is something from my old version of Nuendo. In Nuendo if you had overlapping takes in a track you could right click on the wave and it would give you a list of everything underneath it. The you could select the clip you wanted and it would bring it to the top making it active for editing. Very handy feature. It also automatically muted the other stuff so you didn't have to constantly be muting/unmuting however you could force it to unmute the other clips if needed.

There was another really important feature I had in my head pertaining to lanes but someone distracted me in the house here and derailed my thought process. Darn... it was a good one too.

I think take lanes are a work in progress. Compared to layers there's plenty of pros (for me) and a few cons. Main cons being the arbitary height restrictions, lack of an automatic break open and maximise 'all-in-one' button.

Pros are the easier to use controls, the ability to name takes, no more random mixing up of lanes (aka the rebuild function), but being able to move them into an order that I want far easier, oh and the text notes field is a great feature too.

Ref 'rebuild' - it would be great to have a way of reordering the lanes into a user defined order with options such as ordered by some sort of rating system, capture order, and alphabetical to name three. Please not the old rebuild function though, I never did get what that was about.

I'm sure they'll develop as time goes on.

Same way as you do tracks. Click in the lane header area, somewhere beneath the solo/mute buttons will do and then click and drag.

Possibly, it is very similar to the track method and I know you are having issues with that. What graphics card do you use?

Mine's nothing special - an ATi 5450 which while adequate is hardly cutting edge.

Take Lanes a work in progress - fair enough.
But to not have any option to use Layers as many would prefer, is just, well, rude.

Automation Lanes on the other hand, superb and welcome addition.

I guess 1 out of 2 aint bad ;)