0006402: Idea: Relative time / movable zero - MantisBT

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update

0006402	ardour	features	public	2015-06-30 19:29	2015-06-30 19:29

Reporter	don3	Assigned To
Priority	normal	Severity	feature	Reproducibility	N/A
Status	new	Resolution	open
Product Version	4.1

Summary	0006402: Idea: Relative time / movable zero
Description	I do a lot of editing of different parts of live recordings - working on individual songs from a live set, for example - and I've often thought that it would be very helpful to be able to move the zero point for the time scale to arbitrary locations of my choosing, as I work on different things. In such cases, the time relative to the beginning of the session isn't terribly useful. In fact, I usually start my recordings away from session zero anyway (eg, at +10 minutes), so even if the recording stays contiguous, the absolute time is almost never useful as-is. Internally Ardour would keep whatever absolute time reference is convenient, but the UI (time scale, clocks in non-delta mode, pop-up position when dragging, etc) would display time relative to the user's current zero point - which would start out at the beginning of the session, matching what one sees today.
Additional Information	Not knowing Ardour's internal design, I have no idea whether this would be a relatively simple change affecting display layers only, or a major nightmare. Perhaps the display time could be relative to a user-specified marker? As a follow-on, it would be nice to have an option to allow magnetic/grid units to work relative to the user's current zero as well. There may be other "little details" like that to consider :-) but for me, just being able to work on a "local" time scale would be an improvement.
Tags	No tags attached.

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
2015-06-30 19:29	don3	New Issue