Well, the whole point here is, that a horizontal mixconsole on modern DAWs just does not make any sense at all (and the navigation inside the mixconsole is slow af… only scrolling at the bottom bar or searching tracks with ctrl+f, thats not fast at all). If you don’t need all this info on one page, you still can hide it and then thats good for you, but there are people who need all that info. I don’t know why you are using Cubase and what you are doing with it, but for the things I do, having everything easily accessible, fast and convenient for recording/mixing/mastering this here would be a total gamechanger.
Why opening a separate view which has nothing to do with the main arrange view? Thats just confusing. Enable this in the left zone and you can hide/show it, without needing any additional views or whatever, thats what I call intuitive.
I guess my contention is that - they would have to spend a fair amount of time developing this and would we rather see that time spent on developing other things?
There are all sorts of adjustments that could be made to the current way things are.
There’s really so many other things that need to be improved… If you had to choose this, or 20 other improvements - which would you choose?
To be honest, as it is now, the mixconsole is useless to me, it breaks my workflow. You cannot navigate quickly in there and you cannot really customize it to your needs (order of elements e.g.). And even if you could you are still forced into that 90°rotated track view, so everytime you switch between arrange view and mixconsole you have to adapt your brain to the new view and check where you are (not to mention the font size on a 4k resolution in there, and I am on a 32" monitor, not 27").
Can you somehow understand my situation? (and its not just me, there are other users who think the same…)
I get your point, but on the other side the example from Reaper I posted above was made by a community member which does not even belong to the dev. team of Reaper… But thats a whole other discussion I guess.
I understand to a degree, it may just be a difference of work styles we have.
How is it you are having trouble navigating in MixConsole? I agree there could be some improvements perhaps, just curious as to specifically what is hindering you?
I have very specific template, with Visibility Configurations templated, workspaces templated, Link channels templated (you can use Links as a method of navigating as selecting a Link in the Link menu brings you to the tracks)
And I also have made clever use of the Left and Right mixer zones - not many know about this.
Ctrl-F track search. In all my channel names I have acronyms and symbols for example money symbol ‘$’ for FX channels, so I can ctrl+F search and just type ‘$’ and it will list all my FX channels, click, and it takes me there.
Mixer 1 is my every single channel mixer. Mixer 2 is my bed tracks mixer, Mixer 3 I use as my DAW inputs VU monitoring. Many of my Workspace presets will manage these mixers in different ways, sometimes all of them are on screen, different resizing, etc.
Maybe you’ve done all these optimizations already?
I can only speak for myself, but maybe other people could chime in later too. So:
First of all (and I repeat myself) the 90° rotated view. When doing all your work in the arrange view and then opening the mixconsole, thats a whole other concept. It is just confusing when you have to do some stuff there if your main work is done in the arrange view.
There is no way to scroll efficiently, there is only the little scroll bar at the bottom
If you mouse scroll on the bar at the bottom, it scrolls waay to slow, so if you have plenty of tracks visible, it takes literally ages to scroll from the first track to the last
I am working with visibilty PLE scripts (I have my own acronyms and symbols too), so if I hit key command 1 all my drumtracks are visible, 2 all my bass tracks, 3 all my guitars… and so on. That works OK in the arrange view, only in the mixconsole it takes 3-4 seconds until the view is updated. Thats horrible.
The names of the channels are at the bottom, but the main reason I’d need the mixconsole is to manage plugins on multiple tracks simultaneously. So if I want to move plugins I always have to look at the bottom to see if I selected the right track and then look up to move the plugins all the time… Thats horrible. In the arrange view you would not have this problem at all.
In addition to point 5: on a 4k resolution screen the track names and the latency values are way to small, even on a 32" monitor, the volume values are kind of gray, the peak values aren’t visible at all.
The colored channels are nice, but sometimes its a pain in the ass to see which channel is selected. The “Selected channel brightness” setting in the prefs is not enough imho. Why dont they use the same coloring (brighter) as in the arrange view? That would be clearer.
As a workaround I tried the bottom zone mixconsole, but there are several issues too: The background is not as dark as in the big mixconsole, so there is no color contrast between inserts and background, which is a pain in the eyes (lol literally). Also you can either display inserts OR sends, not both together. Thats really a dumb idea. Also here: all the fonts are way to small.
Even when having around 30-40 tracks visibile at once in the mix console the send names get cut. It seems also because of the position of the db value next to them (and my send names are not too long like “Leaddelay” or “Leadverb”). The db value does not change its position, even when you increase the mixconsole size vertically to make space for the name. So I would need to zoom in to 25 tracks in the mixconsole to see each send with its full name. I would need at least 40-50 tracks on one page to work efficiently. Having 10 different mixers and 20 tracks on each is just not an efficient solution.
Its not customizable. As an example: I cannot display the faders at the top and the inserts at the bottom, heck I cant even hide the faders if I want to.
The crtl-f command is quite OK to search things, but I have sometimes the same abbreviations for different tracks (in combination with different colors). And I am not planning to change my whole naming system only to make it work in a view which does not really work for me(if all the other things on this list would not be an issue anymore I would maybe think about doing that).
When mixing a song and jumping to different specific sections in the song to listen back, you would always have to jump between arrrange view and mixconsole, same goes for event editing etc.->Workflow killer.
12)a) 2 Monitors would be an option, but why if everything could be displayed easily on one? Also if you need vertical screen space your’re f***ed with 2 monitors instead of one big. Also with two monitors you would have to move your head all the time from left to right when mixing. Thats awful (for me).
On modern DAWs there is only one point in having the mixconsole view 90 degrees rotated to the arrange view as it is now. If you are using a hardware faderport or sth like that. Other than that, it just doesnt make any sense at all. Only because it was like that on hardware consoles? Thats no argument anymore. The main view is the arrange view, thats where your events, tracks and the music are. Without doing all the work there first a mixconsole view would be useless. So why don’t adapt everything to that?
I could go on with this list but I think its okay for now, some things aren’t really a big issue, but most of them are! I appreciate that you’re trying to help me though (really), but this whole concept of a rotated view does not make any sense to me at all, it never did (for DAWs).