This is the way it was since the Atari days (until C7) and it’s never looked strange, just functional, like a mixer should be!
+1000
Yep, after more than one year, I still hit wrong places all the time !
Needing noumerous clicks, to get back, to where I initially wanted to go …
We’re entering year 2, of a new workslow area.
( remeber SX1/SX2 ? 100+ missing features from the previous version ! ).
Not good !
And honestly, I don’t see this end anytime soon.
Jan
I “hate” the hovering too.
+1000
+1 Display values and buttons at all times - yeah it slows me down to have to hover to see values, and hover to wait for buttons to appear.
Mike.
I just realized what bugs me the most about them: having an adjacent Send (or Insert, etc.) not get focus because the currently focused item’s hover button is overlapping and blocking it. It’s a terrible design.
+1000. This frustrates me everyday.
+1 Please make them optional.
Better yet, roll back to 6.5. The old (-> 6.5) mixer and channel editor was the most intuitive, clearly laid out of all DAWs.
+1 … I still use it when mixing anything beyond a handful of tracks.
I know change is harder for some people than for others. But despite some teething pains with the new Mix Console, it’s objectively better by almost every measure than the old pre-7x design. So maybe just get over it or use another program if you can’t adapt?
No, 6.5 is a superior mixing view period. The combination of lack of focus for key commands, the stupid popup whackamole parade on the mixconsole, the loss of working space for number of tracks, the destruction of the control room, and many other nuances have rendered the mixconsole unwieldy, slow and cumbersome in comparison to mixing in 6.5. C7/8 have great features added, but until overarching usability issues are resolved, it is still a step backwards for real mixing.
I’m all for addressing usability issues with the new Mix Console. However, suggesting that the solution to these issues is to “revert to the 6.5 mixer” is just silly, magical thinking. Steinberg is NEVER going back to the old mixer paradigm (that is an unimaginative emulation of a hardware mixer that only a reactionary Luddite would prefer). So again, either suggest ways to improve the new design or just use a different program if you can’t adapt or get over the changes.
That is a completely ignorant and straw man argument. First, I didn’t say to go back to C6.5. I said that C6.5 is a better mixing environment, and I listed many but not nearly all of the reasons. In short, mixing in C7/8 is incredibly slow and cumbersome compared to doing the same mixing task in C6.5.
Of course I can adapt, and I’ve been using 7 and 7.5 for awhile now, but I still fail to see what the “objectively better” aspects of the new mixer are. I keep paying for these updates and while I see progress (not enough given the lengthy development cycles, but that’s a different issue), the basics, the bread and butter is what I care a lot more about, especially since the new features are very rarely ground breaking. I’m ok with paying for these updates just to keep Steinberg up and running even though most of them mean very little to me and my workflow, but I am ready to do so only if they don’t mess up the things I really like and need.
With the pre 7 console I could have just a sleek version of the mixer across the entire bottom of my screen and everything I can think of was one or two mouse clicks away, while having an overview over the state of inserts and sends.
100% agree.
The new mixer has sooo many distractions.
I wonder if all that hovering pop-ups are a “cool” thing of the day for the iPad generation graphic designers. It is a horrendous design.
PS. Yes some new features are great additions, but some could have been integrated in a design much closer to the old mixer.
+1
Your analogy was a little much, especially since “new” does not mean “better” by definition. Software designers can make mistakes too.
That being said, and thanks to your reality check, understanding that Steinberg will never admit a mistake by rolling it back, maybe they could provide the old mixer along with the new one, even if they mark it as obsolete and unsupported. I would surely appreciate it. Many software vendors do that because they know that any drastic changes will always create havoc.
Depending on whether their code is wrapped around the UI or the other way around, bringing the old mixer back in could be really trivial.
The only companies that keep legacy features lurking about in their software (resulting in unnecessary bloat and confusion) are those companies that don’t have the strength of their convictions. These companies basically hedge their bets because they can’t make a decision. Steinberg has been guilty of this, for instance, by not “merging” Rack Instruments and Track Instruments into one unified feature set since they both do basically the same thing now.
In Steinberg’s defense, there were probably architectural issues that would have made such a change difficult. But because there were no such constraints on the Mix Console UI, Steinberg made the right choice to deprecate the old design and move into the future with the new paradigm. This isn’t to say that the new Mix Console is perfect or can’t be improved. But it is a FAR better mixer design that forward-thinking users (i.e., people who understand that a software interface should not simply mimic a hardware control surface) have wholeheartedly embraced.
Steinberg made the right choice to deprecate the old design and move into the future with the new paradigm.
I would be the first to quietly muscle my way through the little annoyances that come with a new design, if this was the ground work for the “move into the future” as you put it. Is eye candy or the dependency to AERO the door to the future?
Was there anything about the old mixer that would have hindered progress?
I find it a little strange to talk about vision and progress in relation to a software that still cannot undo 90% of its actions.
Is the new mixer so much prettier that the development that went into it is justified, given the fact that we still cannot undo a gain fader?
Or is the undo also to be called obsolete, or out of touch?
What DAW’s can undo gain faders? That would be nice.
Ah, now I get it. You’re one of those guys who thinks that any attention paid to the visual design of a program is time wasted. Should we just get rid of the GUI altogether and turn Cubase into a glorified spreadsheet with a command line interface for maximum efficiency?
If that’s the desired direction, may I suggest using a Commodore 64 and a copy of Dr. T’s software instead? Or maybe just use a hardware mixer and leave software for people who are not stuck in the 1970s?