I went back through the old thread and dug out my submissions:muzycian wrote:Can you please elaborate? Which FRs? Thanks.
I think this is better in PR8, but need to spend a little more time. I don't recall getting frustrated when I played a bit the other night, so this one may be a "don't care" at this point.1) I think there will need to be some zoom in/out on the plugin setup area, so that it's easier to concentrate on wiring particular bits up. I'm finding the "grab points" for connecting and deleting cable rather touchy to find because they seem to be very small -- maybe they could grow as the mouse passes over/near them to make them easy to hit and shrink back otherwise?
You asked how to handle this if there were multiple cables. Maybe the idea would still work if the user clicked anywhere in the last about 1/3 of the cable, toward the destination end. That would eliminate ambiguity about which cable.2) If the lines in the plugin area are analogous to cables, then it would be nice to be able to re-route a signal by grabbing the destination end of a cable and dragging it to a different input. You could possibly use a left drag to move the cable and a right drag to create a new connection from the existing cable's source to the new plugin's input.
This one has been dealt with nicely.3) A highlight mode, enabled and disabled through the plugin area's context menu, so that as you mouse over things, they "light up" along with their connections to nearest neighbors. A variant would be that mousing over a dummy would light up all of the paths from that to the audio output. Something like this would make it easy to trace signal paths and, especially, to locate unintended connections you'd forgotten about in a complicated setup.
The second part, tracing all the way from a dummy to audio out, still seems useful to me.I could still see some value in this, but I'm guessing the implementation complexities are non-trivial.4) A possible approach to clutter control would be to allow a user to group a set of plugs and "box them up", then be able to toggle between "box closed", where you couldn't see the details or edit the connections, and "box open" where all of the bits are there to be fiddled with.
Would still go for this, if available.5) The ability to color the plug-in boxes like you can parts in the Composer, or
Or this. Don't know if the new VST 2.4 spec messes this up?6) The plug-in's representation in the plugin setup area could be an iconic view of it's GUI (I think EnergyXT does something like that).
Still a keeper.7) Should be possible to lasso a bunch of plugs with the mouse and drag them as a group, rather than dragging one at at time.
And I still like this idea (audio out as a buss at the bottom). A Lot.8] I think the Audio Output should appears as a bus at the bottom of the plugin area, with a more or less arbitrary number of connections. That would (a) make for somewhat cleaner "wiring" and/or grouping of plugs in a path, and (b) make it straightforward to allow right-clicking on an input to the output for solo / mute purposes. ... I could see the potential for a built-in plug similar to the Dummy that's just a Mute device.
And this one, also. Drag the plug onto the wire, hover for a moment and have LUNA pop-up a "Insert this plug into this path?" dialog. If yes, do that automatically. Saves the user several steps of disconnect / reconnect to insert a plug into an existing path.9) Also some way to maybe drag a plugin onto an audio connection and have LUNA automatically insert it into that connection (i.e., break the one connection into two, one into and one out of the new plug). That would speed up workflow while retaining the nice visualization that the modular approach gives you.
Mabye this one, too, but I haven't played with PR8 enough to know for sure if I still think this is useful.10) One way I could conceive of to have a semi-modular approach would be to have racks as plugins within the plugin area. Each could have red and blue triangles to represent the audio and MIDI ins and outs both of the rack and of each slot in it, with inputs to the left and outputs to the right. That way there's an easy way to just use a collection of channel strips if that fits your needs, but each plugin could still be accessible as an automation target, and things like side-chaining would become easier. That feels like a way to get pretty close to the best of both worlds.
So, there you have it, all in one list.
DaveL
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