I find it’s really helpful to do a quick scan down the inspector to see which tracks are set to Musical Timebase and which are set to Linear Timebase. If I see a yellow icon, I know in an instant the track is in Musical Timebase.
But it’s very hard to identify the Linear Timebase icon, because it is the same default color as all the other icons. It would be natural to think that, “Oh, since I don’t see a yellow color’d icon (which is the Musical Timebase icon color), it must be in Linear Timebase”.
That gets me in trouble sometimes though, because though the track is set to Musical Timebase, the icon is not visible (I have to expand the track width to see it). So, not seeing the Musical Timebase icon in the inspector doesn’t always mean that the track is in Linear Timebase in circumstances like this!
A nice workaroud would be to give the Linear Timebase another color, like green for instance. So, the Linear Timebase is visually very different from all the other track setting icons.
Never have this issue myself because of where I located the button. But makes a lot of sense not to rely on the absence of an indicator to determine the state of an item. Although I suppose the same could be said of any toggle or on/off button in the GUI.
Yes, you both need to see that timebase icon is visible - it’s not default on all track types.
For me it could have same color as musical even, better than hardly visible. Especially if using track coloring, contrast is worse.
The note symbol and a clock would be clear as anything.
Maybe extend track controls dialog with color options for every tool and state, really good tool for determine what you want visible.
I moved timebase to first line on every track to be sure it is visible and reachable, no matter track height.
I work in variable tempo projects almost exclusively, and so I’m always changing Timebase from one to the other. If they were both the same color, it would be almost completely unhelpful in terms of a quick scan up and down the project to see which Timebase each track is in. Differentiating colors is key in that respect (IMO)!
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