[FR] Workflow Optimization / Find-As-You-Type Menus

Many simple tasks in my opinion require too many mouse clicks to get done. With time, as more features were implemented into Nuendo, there was no space anymore in toolbar and normal menu. And so menu upon menu was created. Latest anti-example is Cubase 8.5 (I hope this doesn’t get implemented into Nuendo) where there is YET another menu popping up when you hover your mouse near the window edges. Even without clicking. So you move your mouse and windows pop up everywhere without you wanting it.

Suggestion: Re-structure Nuendo’s menus. For example: Get rid of ALL “advanced” menus. Because almost everything in Nuendo is advanced and it only shows that devs didn’t know where else to put it. All those functions in advanced menus CAN be put somewhere. For example, why is “Strip Silence” from an audio clip in the advanced menu? It could be in the Audio menu. Was the audio menu too long? (Yes, 15 entries are a lot.) Then maybe we really have to think of something else than a rigid, huge hierarchical menu structure.

It’s useless to cram 50 option into a menu, it will be impossible to find something there. A new organization is needed and an “Advanced” menu is not the right answer. Otherwise we’ll end up with Advanced 1, Advanced 2, and Advanced 3, in a few years, which doesn’t help as users will only need to search all 3 menus to finally find the right function instead of one. I’m finding myself searching many submenus now already. Was it in Audio? Or Media? Or Advanced? Maybe Process…

Suggestion 2: A cool thing could be a “find-as-you-type”, as with plugins. It’s SO GREAT typing the first letters in an insert and getting only those plugins that match quickly. This would be great in menus as well! Right click on a clip, start typing “pool” and get: “Open Pool Window” and “Find Selected In Pool” and all others that have “Pool” in the name. And all without looking for where it is. (One is in Media, one in Audio - but who knew? I’m looking for them all the time. And why can you only look for Audio files in the pool, not Video files?)

I’m working in this software for hours and hours. I would like to have Nuendo not make me click unnecessarily, to go out of its way, improve my workflow and save me a lot of time.

I think Wavelab 9 has done well in re-thinking it’s interface and grouping tools and menus according to the task at hand, only showing options and tools that make sense at a particular step in the process.
I don’t know if this is fully possible in a DAW, as there are different workflows, but many of them repeat over and over: Importing of audio, looking for and adding sound effects, recording dialog, leveling dialog and mixing with location sound, music, ambience, and SFX, output for stereo or 5.1.

All these are great use cases that could be analyzed and tools and menus could be arranged to reduce click paths, sometimes dramatically. Or come up with intelligent search functions for those operations as suggested with the “find-as-you-type” feature.

(I had this request in a monolithic request post but I realized nobody could comment sensibly in any way so I broke it out. Maybe I’ll see that way what makes sense and people +1 and what doesn’t make sense. Sorry for the hassle.)