Re: [Traverso-devel] Projects / Songs

[Remon Sijrier]

Hello Nic,

> I'm beginning to realize what bugs me with the current implementation.

Guess why I bring the issue up ;-)

> Suppose I'm recording several songs for a CD. I would create a new project
> with 1 song and start recording and mixing. For the next song I would add a
> new song to the same project, record and mix it, add another song and so
> on. When working on song no. 10, am I loading 10 songs each time I open the
> project? Since recording and mixing a song takes at least several days, I
> would not be interested in the other songs while working on song 10, but
> still I would load them every time.

Not entirely sure what the issue is here?
Since you only see 'one' Song at a time, wether you have loaded all the Songs 
in one Project, or just one Song, for the user experience, it's just the 
same.


> The implementation should be more transparent, and a song manager widget,
> as you plan to add, is the first step in the right direction. Here's my
> idea on how to make the implementation a bit more intuitive (IMO):
>
> - all songs of a project should be listed in the song manager, but they
> should not be loaded unless the user explicitly does so. (Think of it as
> the "File -> Recent documents" menu in many other programs.)
>
> - It should be very obvious from the song manager which songs are loaded.
> And it should also be possible to close a song.
>
> - When a project is loaded, it should either load no song, or restore the
> last setup. (Could be an option in the preferences.)

This is something I've been thinking about too, on demand loading/closing of a 
Song. It's mostly a 'user experience' thing, to get the idea that a Song 
is 'closed' or 'opened'. 
The one obvious thing about 'closing' a Song is freeing resources... But from 
code point of view, it would be sufficient to just free the audio read 
buffers, since that's the biggest and almost only memory resource 'hogger'.


By showing all the available Songs in the songmanager view, there isn't a real 
need to 'open' a closed Song explicitly, clicking on it's 'entry' (whatever 
that might be) will open it automatically, at least that's what I think would 
be a very nice way to open Songs.
Of course, closed Songs should take as less space as possible in the manager 
view, or no space at all, by for example a 'quick show' function which shows 
the available (closed) songs.
Hmm, I like that idea ;-)


> It sounds weird indeed. The only example that comes to my mind at the
> moment is Lightwave3d. The pan/zoom/translate functions work exactly as
> described above, and it can happen that you have to re-position the mouse.
> But still I find the function very intuitive.

I'll see what I can do :-)
(patches are accepted too hehe)


Thanks for your input, it's interesting to see how it makes me rethink certain 
things!

Greetings,

Remon