Hi Geoff, hi MusE Team, I just got my hands on Cakewalk Sonar X3, and therefore want to comment your suggestions.
When i saw Cakewalk, I somehow was really, really delighted. Cakewalk IS
mightier than MusE, but not much. There are not-so-many features MusE is
lacking, so we are *really* able to create a DAW which can be an
alternative to "the big players".
However, (and I will not stop mentioning this), I must state again:
I think that MusE's codebase has grown too much; too many design
decisions were made, changed, revoked and replaced in MusE's lifetime.
Writing MusE code is a pain, and it becomes more and more painful. I
really think that we should start from scratch, with an empty project.
We can just copy-n-paste most stuff, but it's important to rebuild it
from the blocks we already have.
Only that way we learn what's actually necessary, we can remove those
tons of wrapper layers, we can make MusE's codebase look nice again.
I think that when this is done, MusE's development speed will rapidly
increase. Just my 2c, again.
But i wanted to comment Geoff's mail. Geoff and the rest, please reply :)
Am 16.10.2013 03:32, schrieb Geoff Beasley:
> 1. LV2 support
no comment. of course we need that.
>
> 2. Better audio management. It's just too cumbersome overall atm. We
> need a bteer way to add (n) tracks, hardwired inputs, no tracks for
> hardware I/O etc.
what exactly could this look like?
I like the way cakewalk does: audio tracks look like they do in MusE, but:
there is a little triangle symbol in the tracklist, which -- when
clicked -- expands the track downwards and offers you more checkable
options:
1. display automation: for every single automation curve, display a
track containing that curve
2. display takes: for ever single take, display the take (this basically
looks like a wave track, just it's actually parented by a wavetrack, and
is not a wavetrack on it's own. cool stuff.
>
> 3. Better use of the mixer as the center of audio throughput - this is
> what a mixer is for! In Muse I hardly ever use it because of it's
> shortcomings as I have described before.
haven't gotten towards that yet. When was this 'before', if you could
cite the Email's subject where you elaborated on this, that'd help me much.
>
> 4. Midi automation.
ah well, automation.
I absolutely want to unify MIDI and AUDIO automation.
And i absolutely want that there will be per-track and per-part
automation... BUT:
1. how can the GUI distinguish what to do? Cakewalk does a cool thing:
each tracklist-entry has a "input filter", which can be set to:
"clips" -> operate on parts as a whole
"clip automation -> $whichever_controller": draw that CTRL inside the
parts
"track automation -> $whichever_ctrl": the obvious.
i think such a filter would also be good for MusE.
2. how to deal with overlapping values, especially with MIDI?
but also audio is a problem.
Cakewalk solves it as follows:
Each Wave Part has an additional own effect rack, and thus has its
own automation. Afterwards, global per-track effects (and auto.) are
applied
MidiParts only offer "Dynamics" as per-part automation, and offer all
MIDI-Controllers as per-track automation
Additionally, MIDI-Controllers can be drawn as in our pianoroll. It
seems to me, that overlapping values lead to undesireable behaviour,
so no black magic going on there.
I would, however, still love to be able to "multiply" them together
somehow. Ideas on how to accomplish this?
>
> 5. Automatic port re-assignment - that is when a midi device has been
> put into the midi devices list and connected, if the client crashes or
> goes away, when it returns it should just re-connect automatically and
> not have to be re-assigned.
I'd even go a step further (and, again, am confirmed by what cakewalk
does): I would like to assign each midi OR audio device not a port
number and not its physical name, but a human-readable name instead.
Tracks will not output "on $hardware_interface", but they will instead
output "on whatever device is behind $human_readable_name".
Behind the scenes, MusE will have a user-defined ruleset to
automatically find out which hardware port belongs to which
human_readable_name, and also auto-reassign them if they have vanished
before.
Plus, multiple profiles:
When in studio, "Korg" is on MIDI port 3.
When mobile, "Korg" is on the jack port called "fancy korg software
synthesizer".
Would that fit your needs?
>
> 6. In a system with many I/O channels (64 here for eg.) the device list
> becomes way too big to view and you can't move it and the contents don't
> scroll. Therefore, you can't assign outputs - It's useless. In the mixer
> you can however as it tends to be able to show them all. Still a pita ;)
Would a selection menu with a "filter textbox" solve this?
"Device select" would give you this then:
[ ]
Blah
Foo
Bar
Baz
...
awfully long list.
you would then click inside the [ ] and type "moni"
result will be:
[moni ]
Monitor 1
Monitor headphones
(end of list)
that would be the probably most intuitive way, just having a filter
(which operates on human-readable names)
(of course, for everything in the above which is left
human-configurable, you *can* of course just use (more or less sane)
default values. No need to input 64 human readable names in your case, then.
Some additions by me:
7: auto-loops: by just making a part longer, it will repeat itself
again and again, looping as long as you want.
7b: parametrized auto-loops.
8: audio stretching, in progress.
9: really important: documentation
10: really important: *easy* hardwired integration of a softsynth. It
does not matter how crappy it sounds, but there MUST be an out-of
the-box MIDI device. When a newbie creates MIDI parts, there must
be sound.
11: MIDI tracker mode: something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEb5vJwYn-c
i found out that this leads rapidly to well-sounding results, even
if it's less powerful (but much easier) than the piano roll.
Not quite sure how to do this... probably by letting the tracker
editor operate on MIDI parts, and try to determine the pattern order
from the order of the parts on the track..? needs more thinking,
suggestions are welcome.
12: lots and lots of navigation aids, like these little symbols in the
parts' corners which allow for quickly accessing certain menu entrys
Cheers,
flo
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