Despite a few minor bugs i could ignore in X2 I never had any major quarrels and feel it is a rock solid version.
Now, x3 is released, my impulsive friend grabs the upgrade first and I'm so excited to check it out. So we are playing with some existing mixes, checking out the new features. One major issue comes up right away that is to me a deal breaker and completely disappointing, not being able to disable the speed comp selecting function.
In X2, 80% of its use is in the midi drum track for me while mildly used in guitar and bass tracks. I would lay down a basic drum track and start building my song layers, guitar, bass etc. Then I go back and create multiple takes of drums each different from the next with my Roland SPD-30. Mostly I am not sure exactly what I want so I just played several different things which I could piece in a main track lane from later.
A simple example say on the midi drum track if I wanted bar 1-4 on take 1, 2 and 6, then on bar 4-8 take 3 and 5 and so on throughout the bars and lanes. I would select, copy and place each of those sections on a blank take lane, duplicate them each a few times and put them in the order I wanted to hear them making a larger section. Then I might rearrange the order of them depending on how it all fits, swapping back and forth until I have the perfect combination. Might even go back to the original takes and extract some more segments and bring them to the main take I am building out. Now imagine I am working to extract pieces from bars 1-100 you can see its going to be even more challenging and I'm going to lose track of what I sliced from because everything on every take lane is being sliced and I am trying to also keep track of what I've extracted vs not. Since what I want from several take lanes all overlap, the comp doesn't work because it assumes that what I want to combine are not all on the same bars within the take lanes.
The problem with this new comp feature in X3 is after a while you have a huge mess if you selected different bars from different takes and its gets all unorganized. Any work around that might exist is time consuming and not ideal because I'm looking to extract areas quickly.
Speed Comp is probably great for other scenarios which I might be able to find a use for, however there seems to be no way of disabling this comp select function for specific situations when its actually a burden. Freedom to use the take lanes how you wish is ideal and forcing this new way as the only way just limits everyone who is using it differently that it may have been intended for.
So for me, I will stick with X2 until a patch adds an enable/disable comp function because the comp feature is counter productive in the way I do things and would end up driving me crazy not being able to shut it off when I need to. If this comp is the only way to work in take lanes now, it will be disappointing and may lead me to another DAW when X2 gets to out of date.
I would think solving this would be easy and should be. Providing a work around that only takes more time is not ideal. What is ideal is a enable/disable speed comping button so you can allow me to choose if and when I want to use that. I need to be able to select bars in only one take without any impact to other takes. When you can add that functionality and I will happily upgrade to X3. Until then X2 works just fine.