[linux-audio-user] Usability vs Intuitability in Ardour

[Paul Davis]

> Ardour is great but, but the good music records live generalization is 
> wrong.

I continue to claim that as a generalization, not as a rule, that its
correct. Good instruments have qualities that the body can learn and the
mind cannot. You can certainly make great music using Csound 5, offline
rendering and other tools, its just that *most* good music isn't done
that way.

> on portable multitracks, etc. Right now that is a weak area, I had way 
> too much trouble importing simple audio files including a total crash 
> when I accidentally clicked a .sfk instead of a .wav. ( had to kill jack 
> and ardour ).

i don't know what version you are using, but i remember doing a fix for
this sometime near beta29. if libsndfile fails to open it, ardour should
fail elegantly. if libsndfile has issues with the format, we may do
something ugly and horrible.

> My biggest beef with aroud is that there are no obvious hot keys, and no 
> obvious pull down menu or section for making them. My favourite part 
> about Sonar ( IMHO the best user interface for a daw ever ) is how easy 
> it is to change how you control the app.

in 2.0, we may start using menus with accelerators and so forth in the
item labels, along with the GTK dynamic reassignment model. this is not
present in 1.0, for a variety of reasons. there is still the basic
problem of keys doing different things in different windows - ardour's
mixer and editor deserve to be able to use some keys in their own ways,
and GTK (along with Qt) is not well set up for that if you want to use
their standard hot key/accelerator systems.

i like sonar's interface too, and you might note that we stole the idea
of the bar controller from them.