Hi all,
 
Im new to Sonar and as just bought an Acer Iconia windows 8 tablet and is trying out the Touch workflow in Sonar X2a.
it works great when navigating and turning nobs and sliders, but I cant move clips in trackview or select them, same thing with editing audio and midi.
Should I be using a mouse also(which could be fine since it has greater precision)or is more touch support going to be added?
 
Thanks!

If you search for "Multi-touch" in the X2a help file, you'll get most of the info you need. Basically, what's supported is:

Adjust knobs, faders and buttons. 
Scroll and zoom in the Track view. 
Scroll both horizontally and vertically in the Console view. 
Scroll in the Inspector. 
Drag content from the Browser, with visual feedback. 
Adjust MultiDock divider/splitter. 
Control Bar Transport module touch support. 
Arrange windows on the screen. 
Trigger cells in the Matrix view. 
Enable/disable steps in the step sequencer.

So yeah, you need a mouse too, and I'm sure that's true with most complex desktop applications. I would think they'll be adding support for other tasks. They definitely should add support for dragging clips, notes, etc., and a lot of other things.

btw, that looks like a cool device you bought. Even in the review on CNET, though, they said you should definitely add a mouse.

Thanks for ypur replay.

I figur that was the case guess I just have to buy a small Bluetooth mouse then 😊. The thing is that in other DAWs (like Studio one) dragging notes etc works flawless since the touch is translated to mouse emulation. It is kind of nice to drag around notes and clips.

So perhaps a button in the GUI to switch between multitouch and regular mouse mode.

I bought the cheapest Iconia W700 with i3 processor and 64 gb SSD, but it is surpricingly fast. With the biggest drawback the bulit in soundcard and asio4all, as usual.

Yeah, the more I think about it, it's pretty strange that simply enabling multi-touch support in an application would automatically disable simple touch-to-mouse functionality in that application. Like maybe when you're in the clips pane, it should be you have to use two fingers to scroll the timeline, and you use one finger to drag clips. That would make sense to me.

Hi lurig,

In X2 we gravitated towards utilizing touch gestures that made the most ergonomic sense. In the track and clips view scrolling and zooming are the operations that lend themselves best to the resolution of touch, whereas selection and dragging clips or other objects is best suited to the resolution of the mouse and actually quicker to do.  While you may be able to drag notes and clips around in the pre touch enabled version of SONAR because of the fallback behavior its not very usable and error prone. What looks cool on the surface may not be that usable when you actually try and use it :)

That is not to say that we won't expand touch to allow other editing operations in the future, but they have to be more carefully thought out to work properly on touch displays. For example you don't want to be accidentally moving things around just because you happened to touch something.

We have generally found that a combination of touch and mouse/trackpad gestures is the most efficient.


PS: BTW two finger scroll though valid is kind of an outdated touch gesture and not very ergonomic. We deliberately stayed away from multiple finger overloads since they tend to be not very usable. All our views that implement touch do not get the default windows "mouse promotion" behavior by design..

StepD


Yeah, the more I think about it, it's pretty strange that simply enabling multi-touch support in an application would automatically disable simple touch-to-mouse functionality in that application. Like maybe when you're in the clips pane, it should be you have to use two fingers to scroll the timeline, and you use one finger to drag clips. That would make sense to me.

Its actually quite normal. When you implement real touch support you get to choose exactly how you want to implement the response to the user touching the screen. Windows default touch support basically translates into mouse messages. Depending on the application or view it can be quite unusable.

Understood. I would imagine it's got to be difficult to come up with a balanced strategy for a new technology like this. The last thing you need is to have to write a second manual just for touch gestures. Better to keep things simple, especially at the beginning. I'm really hoping multi-touch takes hold in the long run. I think it has a lot of potential for DAWs using a second flat/horizontal surface (or even as a single using something like lurig33 bought).