Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] News about sequencers (not my own though!)
From: David Olofson (audiality_AT_swipnet.se)
Date: su tammi 16 2000 - 21:56:34 EST
On Sun, 16 Jan 2000, David Slomin wrote:
> > A clip should be more than a graphic grouping of events. It is a
> > logical UI object, and should have all the *useful* functions you
> > expect! Who cares for a dodgy mouse selection scheme that they have
> > worked around to get back the few advantages of the old "one dot per
> > bar" scheme, and that doesn't do ANYTHING but try to make selections
> > easier, and put nice colors in your arrange view? It seems almost
> > ridiculous to me when I think about it...
> >
> > Further, there are times when you wish you could move things around
> > inside a clip. Now, what you get is the piano roll, the staff view,
> > or the event list. And in CW, you can't even see which clip's events
> > you are moving around! It's just the plain old, useless (in most
> > situations) full single track edit mode. :-( Even pattern based
> > trackers are more structured than that - they have a way of dividing
> > the timeline into logically relevant parts.
>
> When I use Cakewalk, I don't often use clips, as I prefer to copy
> and paste in the tracks and then doctor each copy. To me, the music
> can sound a little too repetitive if it's just cookie-cutter links
> throughout. However, I understand that clips are useful for
> certain purposes. There are, after all, many people who are
> perfectly satisfied with trackers and other pattern sequencers.
Clips work pretty well for keeping track of verse/chorus/break/bridge
style structures, but there certainly is a problem when you start
tweaking... "That last chorus needs a special fill in the last bar -
but hey, now we have multiple versions of the chorus! Cool... And
now, how do we keep track of this...?"
> In any event, PEGS doesn't have an overview/"track view" window
> at all, just its unique display window (an extremely distant cousin
> of Cakewalk's piano roll).
Sounds like that could be a lot more efficient than arrange + piano,
as long as there is still some way of grouping events. I didn't enjoy
having to count the bars in the older CW versions when
copying/moving... But there you had no hints, like colors, or even
the micro piano roll or waveform style thing you can get in the
arrange view nowadays.
> > My idea: Clips inside clips. (Allow any number of levels if you dare,
> > but it might be too much for some users to sort out... ;-)
[...]
> duplicate commands somewhere). Loading and saving would be tricky,
> since SMF (MIDI files) doesn't support this,
Well, saving as .MID kills just about all display info with CW as
well. SMF just isn't meant to be a universal multimedia file format!
;-)
> but PEGS allows you to
> plug in your own file formats if you want (yes, every single thing
> in the damn program is a callback). How's that sound?
Cool! One thing that's certainly pissing me off with most audio
sequencers I've seen so far, is that you can't export the audio
tracks to some useful format. Not even a bunch of wave files + a
simple ASCII playlist! Any non destructive audio edits are lost
unless you export all audio tracks as a single, massive audio file...
> > Yes, I think Cakewalk is a very, very limited application with a
> > stone age design! *argh!* It just has lots of functions in a huge
> > pile, and they are getting hard to access in any useful way these
> > days.
>
> I think Cakewalk was a nice, solid, track-based MIDI sequencer.
> It's been going downhill ever since it abandoned that narrow goal.
Yeah, the first attempt on clips was just a big, buggy mess. And
they dropped cal! :-( The only reason I switched was audio... They
fixed most bugs since then, but it's still just a broken design.
> (And that goal in and of itself was definitely insufficient for
> most types of music.)
<whine>
Well, it worked, but the lack of a visual representation of
shorter/longer bars (breaks) and other things made it remind a bit of
a crippled tracker. Even simple, straightforward, constant BPM
eurodance music causes problems!
</whine>
Just a huge, pure piano roll - that is, no (flawed) abstraction at
all - would have been more flexible, and not much harder to use.
<bash>
BTW, CW 8.0 *still* doesn't support editing events from multiple
tracks in a piano roll view! (Haven't checked 9.0 out yet.) How much
sense does it make to allow editing events from multiple clips, but
not multiple tracks!? The arrange view gives the impression that
clips are independent objects. It also allows moving clips to other
tracks. (Which makes it easy to make serious mistakes, resulting in
new tracks being created and that kind of things...)
I think all this indication that using both tracks *and* clips is
wrong. It could be made more helpful than it is in CW, but there seems
to be better ways.
</bash>
//David
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