Right now the only way to resize the upper half of tracks area is dragging the divider by hand. There’s no key command to collapse it out of the way entirely.
I think there are two things that would help with management:
Create option that auto-collapses the divider upward so that there is no visible gap between the upper and lower tracks area. The workflow I imagine is having all “Global Tracks” in a dedicated folder which remains visible at the top of the project at all times. When you open it, the upper area would expand to fit the visible tracks in the folder. You could then drag out only the tracks you need a particular project and close the folder, which would automatically collapse the upper tracks area again. This would allow you to keep all you “Global Tracks” at the top, nice and tidy.
A dedicated key command to toggle the entire upper tracks area’s visibility on/off, so it can be hidden and restored entirely with one keystroke would also be quite handy.
I do realize that creating a macro that shows and hides a folder labelled “Global Tracks” is possible, and is in fact how I have my project running now, but it doesn’t ensure that it states pinned to the top of the tracks area. However one thing I’m finding is that one of the zoom functions that I like to use when using the divider feature, Zoom Tracks Full, only refrains from acting on tracks that are in the area (upper/lower) you have selected. So if you are not using the divider ALL tracks, including the marker/tempo/etc. tracks that are usually kept tucked away, get expanded. So this doesn’t feel like a great solution either.
Have either one of these additions (ideally both) would make it much faster and easier to manage that upper area temporarily without permanently resizing or losing track state.
@Googly_Croft Thanks for the comment. That command simply dissolves or suspends the upper/lower divider. I don’t want to do that exactly. I want to hide everything that is located in the upper tracks area.
And an option to “auto-collapse” so that it re-sizes automatically to whatever tracks happen to be located in the upper tracks area would be helpful too. Again as of right now, it can only be accomplished manually via a handle drag currently.
What happens if you set all the Tracks in the upper section to not be visible in the left Zone, does that end up looking like what you want? If it does then one path might be to use the Project Logical Editor to change their visibility.
@raino Thanks for the idea. This didn’t actually work because for some reason “divide track list” is not a supported pre-command in the PLE. But you got me experimenting with it this morning and I think I’ve got something that will work for me.
I can show and hide the “Global Tracks” folder but keep that in the lower zone. If there is a track that I need from the Global Tracks folder for my project, I can unhide the GT folder and simply drag it to the upper tracks area with one simple manual dragging of the divider area. I think this workflow should work. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Again thanks for the comments. Always helps to get the thought process moving in different tangents.
I run this along with the opposite (Open and Unhide) inside of Keyboard Maestro to give me a toggle switch. Of course you could run it without KM by setting the Transform actions to toggle but if you manually open/close or hide/unhide the folder, these two could fall out of sync. Or if you don’t care about closing the folder it would be even simpler, but this way it stays nice and tidy in the Visibility Tab.
It´s a good idea, what we need is a Divider auto-fit option.
You can also use Workspaces, I use them all the time: one showing only 1 track in upper zone and one showing more, with one macro you can switch between the 2 views.
Yeah, I considered Workspaces. This is something I’ll def look at more here in future projects. Coming from Logic (hence the desire for a global tracks section) I never really used this feature, although something similar did exist. Seems a lot more widely used among the Cubase crowd.
