Take Lanes Enhancements

Mods, please feel free to merge this if there's something similar (had a quick look and didn't see anything).
 
I've been working on a project with a silly amount of vocal tracks in each song, as I tend to do with a lot of our music. Typically, I'll record at least 3 or 4 layers per track and either comp later in the case of a lead vocal or I'll stack them in the case of backing vocal choir tracks. Easy enough to do so far (although I really don't get on well with Lanes and the comping tools - I did prefer the old Layers way, honestly).
 
There's been a few frustrations with managing this stuff though.
 
After you've done a lot of recording in different takes on the same track, you end up with a HUGE pile of lanes, and a lot of empty space. EG: I've done 3 vocals for chorus 1, then done 3 for chorus 2, and then 3 for chorus 3, all at different times. They won't just be in 3 lanes, they'll be spread in groups over 9 lanes. And sure, while it's easy enough to move everything to compact the lanes manually, it's quite time consuming, especially if there's a lot of takes over a long song.
 
Getting those takes out to separate tracks if you want to do panning is time consuming too - you can't just select all of the layers and drag them into other tracks or it recreates the layers there (which is fair enough, I guess), you have to move them one at a time to whatever track you want to drag them to. This took me FOREVER to do this for the piles of vocal tracks I recorded on this project.
 
So I'd like to suggest the following features, all right-click things like the Remove Empty Take Lanes menu is:
 
COMPACT LANES
Basically this would move as many non-overlapping items upwards in the layer order and remove any empty tracks under that. Now this isn't without its issues - if you've specifically tried to keep an order to your takes, that would potentially ruin them. I'd suggest an option menu where you could control how this happens, EG: order by take name, take number, preserve lane order if there is any overlapping items on an above lane. I'm sure we could think of some great options to streamline how this works.
 
EXPLODE TO TRACKS
This would change the take lanes into separate tracks. Again a menu option could be to duplicate the FX bin of the parent track that was exploded for each of the newly created tracks (could be a CPU killer, however, but the option to do it anyway would be good), and duplicate the outputs and sends that the parent track had.
 
MOVE TRACKS TO LANES
The opposite to the last thing, basically, where you'd select multiple tracks, right click and choose MOVE TRACKS TO LANES and it would move all of those tracks into a single track with each of those tracks as a lane. Could be useful from a management point of view if you were layering things, or if you did separate takes for a vocal track, for example, and you'd like to use the comping tools that come with Take Lanes. I'd say it makes sense not to assume any FX bin or routing for this new track in this case.
 
While we're on the subject of lanes, just as an added thing, I'd like to see some enhancements when it comes to zooming. If I Z+drag over a track with lanes in them, the zoom goes nuts. I get a HUGE overview track and the lanes under it are off the screen. I'd like zoom in this case to act as it does for regular tracks when the lanes are expanded.
 
Anyway, that's my ideas. This would have saved me days of work this week doing prep for mixing with the lane to track arrangements!

Yeah, I also have a vague recollection of this kind of thing being brought up in the past now that you mention it! Oh well, cheers to whoever thought of this stuff first - I like the ideas! 

Like the ideas.  Probably would make me use the take lanes and comping feature a little more.
 

A BIG +1 to COMPACT LANES!!!