Hi all, I picked up a Frontier Designs AlphaTrack a few months ago, seemed like the cheapest way to get some hands on access to plugins and scrubbing. As it turns out, 90% of my work since buying it has been straight up tracking, so I've only recently started to spend some proper time with it. Initial impressions are good, particularly for the price and footprint, but a few things are stumping me.
1. Anybody managed to get it so that the track selected via keyboard/mouse and the track that AlphaTrack is currently working with stay in sync? Currently, if I select a different track in the track table, AlphaTrack totally ignores it and I have to manually bank through to be able to tinker. The manual does mention control-clicking on tracks to lock the selections together, but when I control-click, it just hides the track. 2. Unless I'm overlooking something very obvious, there doesn't actually appear to be a select button on this thing? With that in mind, has anybody found a way to select multiple tracks using it, or at least that it has any impact that increases the productivity of multi-selection compared to the clunky keyboard methods? 3. When I shift hold and twist the left most encoder as described in the manual to jump to the first track in the session, there seems to be quite a few blank tracks to scroll through before I get to what seems to be the first audio track. I'm guessing they're buses, perhaps a master fader too, just haven't had any eyes to varify yet and I was working to a schedule so couldn't really test. If anyone could shed any light that'd be great, if not I'll figure out a way of testing the theory. 4. When I scrub, the insertion point doesn't seem to stick at the location I finished scrubbing. I've tried toggling scrub mode off with the correct button, hitting play straight from scrub mode, hitting stop whilst still in scrub mode all to no avail. Now that I write this, it occurs to me that there's a checkbox related to the behaviour of the insertion point after scrubbing somewhere in prefs, so it could be as simple as that, but I'd swear Mackie Control used to do this out of the box. Am I just pushing buttons in the wrong order, is it the preferences set incorrectly, or something else entirely? 5. Given that I have mixing work potentially coming my way over the next few months, I'd be curious to know how powerful people are actually finding the AlphaTrack for control over plugins. On paper, it looks to me like less encoders adds an extra layer of complications, but I'd like to be wrong. My feeling going into it is that although everything will still be able to be controled, the need to use the middle encoder in order to select which parameter the right-hand encoder adjusts without spoken feedback is going to slow me down compared to having them all spread out on a bigger surface in front of me. I guess I'm wondering whether anybody has found any value in this unit for mixing. Cheers for any tips or nudges in the right direction... Scott
