Brandon Ryan [Cakewalk]


But for years, we've heard how SONAR has too many buttons, and really...it did. Menu items were all over the place and the UI needed streamlining. From our perspective far more agree iwth this than don't .

Unfortunately, X1 makes this "all over the place" much worse.  Case in point:  Sonar 8.5 had 12 main drop-down menus, all accessible by The 17 year old Windows Alt + ______ keyboard shortcut standard.  (i.e. Alt + F pulls down the file menu, no matter where you are in the program.)

X1 took these same commands and scattered them off into 19 menus - only 9 of which can now be accessed without a mouse.  Open up the same project in both versions with just Track view and the inspector open and you'll see what I mean.

This is bad enough,  but it also raises one of my all-time User Interface pet peeves -- pulldown submenus that change location.  Those freaking submenus--depending on what you have open, visible, expanded, resized, etc.--they can literally vary in location by 9.5 inches horizontally and 1 inch vertically.  So, X1 has removed keyboard access to them, made them extremely unpredictable as to where they are going to be on your screen.  The "track" submenu on my 23" monitor can be almost all the way to the left or 3/4 to the right, depending on whether the inspector or browser is open.   It is hard to imagine a dentist or a surgeon or woodworker anyone who relies on their tools having them move around.  My "go-to" menus now take an extra effort each and every time I use them--are they visible?  Yes.  Let's find it on the screen--well, it is going to be somewhere in a 9.5 sq. inch area somewhere in the upper part of my screen...uh...Good.  Now lets find where the mouse cursor is.  uh.....OK, now move it the 15 inches to the track menu.  Click on it, drop down the menus.  Congratulations!!, it has only taken 4-5 seconds and  you've made the track submenu actions visible! That's only about  800% to 1000% slower than the equivalent action in 8.5, where I could pull down the menu AND fire off the command [ALT + E,K] in about a half second WITHOUT LOOKING up from my work--without assigning a keybinding. 

Stable location + stable keystroke combinations regardless of context... these are always going to be more efficient than hunting and clicking with the mouse to run a command or pull up a dialog box.   Can we please have those back as Menu items instead of submenus?  If they are always going to be onscreen, why can't they stay at the very top as before?

mike_mccue


Facts is facts



click view image to see as 100% scale

+1  The fact that freeze status, Archive status aren't visible at all in the one-line view until you kill about half your track view is a real drag.  I find myself constantly resizing all of my tracks to make the track filter visible--Why that can't be relocated to the inspector?  The inspector and browser "collapse" view still takes up nearly 7 square inches of screen real estate (8.5 could totally collapse).

With the same layout compared between the two versions, 8.5 showed Archive status, Automation Read , Write Status, Freeze Status, in much less room.  There is so much wasted empty areas.  It is showing me a streamlined view of a lot of stuff I don't care about, and requires near constant resizing to display the info I do need because of the bulky fonts and as someone mentioned "Duplo vs. Lego graphics."   Please don't suggest screensets...they crash on me if I click through them slightly too fast.

It isn't per track in X1?

There's no per-track AUTO-echo option, only Input echo On/off for each track. If we want to enable auto-echo, we have to globally activate "always echo current midi track" option in preferences. 

In X1 there is an Edit Filter on every track. (It determines what you are editing in the Track Pane. Clips, Envelopes, Inline PRV etc. I think it would be a good idea to have a global one too. If you switch the global menu, all tracks change. For flexibility they should then add a lock option for individual tracks so that if there is a track which you always want to keep on Volume envelope (for instance) you can. Anyway, just an idea...

I think it will be certainly more useful than widget tab switcher, so I vote for it! Write it down to wish-list.

I also made small track icons with no background. I think this looks neater.

I think background is a need... If we tweak this grey panel color into something else (and actually it's what I'd like to do), with some bright color settings icons can become undistinguishable without background.

BTW, do you have some design plan for MIDI track also?) just to have the full picture

Jekyll Vance


Well, the next proposal is just a thought experiment, though I hope somebody may like it.
What if we make more use of this empty area above the tracks? 
Let's place there a thing that can be called mini track inspector. It will allow us to keep tracks minimized and "big" track inspector closed most of the time.
In essence mini-inspector is a separate widget tab, that is constantly visible on top of all tracks, that shows information only for the active track (its widget content may be customized via widget tab manager)
You can switch between time display (which is more appropriate when you are working in the clips pane) and mini-inspector (which is useful when you are working with tracks' parameters in the track pane) with dedicated button.



Useful or not?

I'd be fine if the freeze and archive button were up there, but only if there was better visual feedback on the track.  If I have 20 tracks and 5 of them are archived, 3 are frozen, I want to be able to see that during playback, not by having to focus on each track and look at this button at the top.  Perhaps if the whole track would change to a distinct translucent color (NO MORE 6 different gradations of gray please!) upon freeze or archive.  It would free up space (I wouldn't have to open my track headers to 7" wide to view this status, and hopefully it would continue to report this status during playback--the current Archive and Freeze and audio engine status inexplicably disappear upon playback, and display again only after the transport stops.

  Yes you are right, frozen and archived tracks should have some special color marking, preferrably customizable, for the whole track, like we have for selected track, so we can check their status not being depandant from archive/ freeze buttons visibility. I guess we can write it down to wish-list too 

UnderTow


I've also been busy in the meanwhile. Here is the latest version of my mock-up:




I've unfolded FX Chains. This let's you see what is in an FX Chain. I think this is both much neater than the little box that opens in X1 and more functional. With the bigger FX Bin there is no issue with readability  of names. I suppose it needs a little button to open/close the chain but as it is it would be a right click context menu. This is already better than the way it is in X1 IMO.

I've added an indentation for Tracks in Track Folders. (With a little linking line like in previous versions of Sonar). I've done this slightly differently than how Sonar used to do it: I've made the track icons and track names align with the Track Folder icons and names. I think this looks neater than it did in old Sonar but it is still clear that items are in a folder due to the indentation. The Folder names and icons etc are indented compared to regular tracks making them easy to find when you have All tracks in a project minimised. I think that overall this is both clearer than X1 and neater and clearer than old Sonar.

I've shaved off some more pixels from a minimised Track. (You can see it in the Track Folder). It is now 21 pixels tall compared to 25 pixel in X1. That means that in the space that X1 uses for 32 tracks (800 pixels), you could put 38 Tracks with my design. (+ 2 pixels to spare. ;-)).


Btw, if you want to compare between my design and the existing X1 design (with similar items loaded) you can open the following to links in adjacent tabs and use CTRL-TAB and CTRL-SHIFT-TAB to switch between the two (At least in Firefox):

http://puretone.nl/pics/Audio_Track_Header_Suggestion_No_Sends_V17_cropped.png
http://puretone.nl/pics/X1_Original.png


I'm going to play with the brilliant Mini Inspector idea next.


UnderTow

I appreciate the effort you have put in , but to me personally , this is cluttered and all the colours would be very quickly headache inducing. Each to their own. Don't let my comment put you off your redesign.

I appreciate the effort you have put in , but to me personally , this is cluttered and all the colours would be very quickly headache inducing

All colors must be customizable, like in S8.5, that's what we want anyway. 

 
Shame Brandon's vanished again, but I understand that, if he were to acknowledge how good this is, it would perhaps build an expectation that we may see some of these changes.
 
Child

Don't worry - I'm here.

Well, the idea about "mini-inspector" evolved into something bigger.

On widescreen monitors we have a lot more place available in horizontal plane than in vertical.
Multidock is aligned horizontal. Though, some views (markers, event list, meters/key, SysX) will be handier to use and waste less space, if positioned vertical (like browser by default). On the other hand, sometimes we want the synth rack to be positioned horizontal (when working with assigned synth parameters). 

So, what we need instead of browser + multidock concept, are two universal multidocks with "equal rights", positioned one horizontally and another vertically. All standard legacy views from Sonar 8.5 must have ability to be docked in either of them; media browser and plugin browser should be treated separately, so we can have one of them docked horizontally and another vertically, having access to both at the same time, if we want so. Synth rack must be independent from them and retain two modes, vertical and horizontal, that we already see in X1.

  This also concerns Track inspector - it has a lot of modules (in X1 they are quite bulky and take much space vertically, so they never fit on screen at once). So track inspector should be treated like any other view and also should have two modes, with horizontal mode docked in horizontal multidock. A view like that will allow us to have more modules visible at once, than we have in vertical mode, and work with minimized tracks most of the time without that space-eating double-strip inspector pane on the left.   

Brandon Ryan [Cakewalk
]

Shame Brandon's vanished again, but I understand that, if he were to acknowledge how good this is, it would perhaps build an expectation that we may see some of these changes.

Child

Don't worry - I'm here.

I didn't see you reply to my post, so I wanted to ask again. Why does the X1 manual say that "archiving" removes clips (not groove clips) from RAM and not from drive streaming as you said in the other thread? Which one of these things is correct?