View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | View Status | Date Submitted | Last Update |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0006660 | ardour | bugs | public | 2015-10-30 20:02 | 2015-12-02 23:34 |
| Reporter | don3 | Assigned To | |||
| Priority | normal | Severity | feature | Reproducibility | always |
| Status | new | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 4.3 | ||||
| Summary | 0006660: A few ideas for tweaks to automation editing | ||||
| Description | Ardour version: 4.4.0, nightly 4.4.163 There have been a number of recent changes to automation editing that have made for a much more pleasant experience, IMO. I'd like to propose a few more minor tweaks that (I think) could also help, at least for my my work flow. - Dragging lines does not seem to have the "affinity" for 0.0 dB that dragging points has. It would be nice if they were consistent. Note: "Affinity" is probably not the right term here. Basically I find it's almost always possible to hit 0.0 while dragging, even without expanding the height of the automation lane, but not so much with other values. It may be similar to the optional "magnetic" effect on the time axis, but with a much smaller snap zone -- or not. - IIUC, dragging a line currently displays the value where the cursor is. If the line is horizontal, this is the same as the endpoints' value, by definition -- which is good. For non-horizontal lines, I can imagine that the value at the cursor location could be interesting/useful in some cases, but I would prefer to see the endpoints' values, either instead of, or in addition to the value at the cursor. If the endpoints are visible, their values could even be displayed next to the points -- in the same way they are when hovering over or dragging them individually. - Hovering over a line does not display a value, in contrast to hovering over a point. It would be nice to see some consistency here too. And the same discussion about horizontal vs non-horizontal lines applies here. - Sometimes when dragging points or lines, I notice the value "-0.0" come up. I assume this is a bug (and I can open a separate bug report for it if needed). It is not always repeatable, and I think I've seen it much less often since approx 4.0. (OT: I see -0.0 very often for level on the mixer faders; that also seems like a Bad Thing...) - Perhaps the "affinity" concept could be extended a little. There are times when I've wished I could define my own list of values that should be "easy" to hit while dragging, instead of or in addition to 0, such as -3, -6, etc. I can imagine, that with relatively few vertical pixels to work with in the fader lanes, there might be limits as to what's possible/practical here. Or (maybe this is really reaching) use values that have been used before on the current tracks (or all tracks in the session) as defaults. Or at least, make the values of any near-by points easy to hit, so that horizontal lines are easy to create in Draw mode. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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A quick re on the +/- 0.0. The numeric display rounds to the first decimal, the actual value is more accurate (see the slider/numeric-entry in the track-header) -0.0 is a value smaller than 0 but larger than -0.05. +0.0 is a value equal to or lager than 0 but smaller than 0.05. fixing this ties in with adding a magnetic snap zone that you mentioned. I like the idea, it'll improve usability. |
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Thanks for the explanation. Makes sense - I should've thought of that actually. :-) It (-0.00) just looks kinda funky from the outside (at least to weird folk like me), like something's amiss under the hood -- but I guess we could think of it as sort of a warning indicator that we aren't quite on zero. But then, for symmetry, 0 < value < 0.05 should show as "+0.00", rather than just "0.00", right? [1] We'd only get that indication around zero, not around any other values -- so kind of a special case... Anyway, yeah, some kind of snap would at least make those values less likely to be set as automation points. (Same story on faders, etc.) [1] : Hm - somewhat OT, but should all positive level values (ie, strictly > 0) be displayed with leading '+', even on faders and such? I think I'd be OK with that. Any down-sides? Display fields (like over faders) already accommodate a sign, even in narrow strips, although '+' may be a bit wider than '-' in whatever font's being used there. |
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+1 for the 0.0 snapping I was looking for this just now. In a same way, pan automation could snap to "center". Why not add a "set to 0" and "set to center" in context menu for an automation point ? |
