Re: [Traverso-user] groups?

[Remon]

Hello!

> years ago, i was following the development of Protux, and always believed
> it was a beautiful piece of work -- i am delighted to see many of its
> design principles alive and in active development in Traverso!

It's interesting to see that even back then a number of people followed the 
development of the concept and application, and it's great to get feedback!

> one general concept which is missing is the idea of operating on groups of
> items.

Yes.

> for example, say i have a number of regions placed on various tracks, and i
> want to move them all to another spot on the timeline while retaining their
> position relative to each other -- this would be very difficult currently,
> because each region would have to be moved separately, and we would have to
> calculate all the regions' new positions and place them manually. it would
> be easy if we could select multiple regions and move them all at once, as a
> group.

We call it AudioClips, although Regions seems to be used everywhere else hehe. 
The idea is that one can select a 'Region' (not functional yet of course) 
which then would collide with the 'audioclip Region'.

Anyways, selecting clips was and is possible, but it contained some bugs, and 
operating on the group was not implemented, so we decided to turn the feature 
of, until group operations are implemented.
Fortunately, due recent changes this has become much easier to implement, 
specifically moving groups of clips, which is what I'm working on right now!

> another example of groups would be track groups: one could select some
> tracks and make them all part of an active group, and then gain/mute/solo
> operations would apply to all tracks in the group.

And similar for AudioClip groups I suppose? This is certainly something I have 
in mind, but I'm not yet sure how this would work with the 'soft selection' 
concept. It'll most likely require some additional action to toggle the 
group 'active' or 'inactive'. Once the group is active, gain, mute etc will 
apply to the group.
Of course, ideas and suggestions are welcome!

> two other things that occur to me right now:
>
> 1. the ability to make arbitrary busses -- i.e. for subgroups in a mix
> (there seems to be no way to do anything other than send each track to a
> master stereo bus), or at least the ability to assign tracks directly to
> abitrary mono output busses so we could mix in an external application or
> send to multiple outputs for surround monitoring.

Yes, a much wanted feature. More developers would be great :D

> 2. access to precise panning settings -- currently there isn't even a
> visual indicator for panning. it would be useful to be able to input a
> specific value.

Tracks show panning right? The value is in the range -1.0, 1.0 which perhaps 
is a bit strange? Dunno what's the 'default' for this, but using dB values 
seems not to make much sense....

What has been long on the todo list, and which I gave a shot yesterday is 
numerical input during hold actions.
Currently only works for Gain (cvs only of course). Hold G and start typing on 
the numerical pad.

> i would say these are the only things which are preventing me from using
> Traverso more than Ardour!

Thanks a lot for the feedback, most of your wishes as you see are being worked 
on, or high on the TODO list, it's basically a lack of man power to implement 
it.
Besides that, a lot of time is spend in figuring out how to 'design' the 
functionality in such a way that Traverso is fast, stable and a pleasure to 
use, while keeping the interface as clean as it is now, etc etc.

Regards,

Remon