All's well and good until I decide that it would be nice for the compression to affect more than 1 track. Simply copying another instance of the rack already in use seemed like a place to start, but that doesn't work because (insert explanation from someone who actually understands racks here).
My next attempt involved bussing multiple tracks to one output track and then putting the output rack there.
(insert ear-shredding feedback here as I fumble to kill Tracktion as quickly as humanly possible to make it stop)
This leads to 2 requests/suggestions:
1. Almost every time I try to 'go deep' with racks and understand them and do potentially useful things with them, I get a wire crossed somewhere and get feedback. Thankfully I'm on headphones most of the time, so I haven't damaged a nice pair of speakers yet, but it's a real annoyance. Is there some way you can detect this before it happens and have Tracktion put up a red flag instead of a piercing wail?
2. The sidechain compressor would be really sweet if we didn't have to use racks. You could do that magic behind the scenes and just give it a little drop down menu where we choose the track to trigger from. We could put the compressor on whatever tracks we want and key from the same source or different ones, without having to 'think in 4 dimensions' and stitch it all together somehow using racks.
I'm going through the original rack tutorial that is hosted on the tracktion site right now and it's enlightening, but I can't shake the feeling that it's never going to be something I'm going to be comfortable with. Maybe there's some way in which you can dumb it down a bit for people like me, but still leave all the options available under the hood for those who get it. Maybe some sort of 'rack wizard' that starts with some ball park options of what I'm trying to do and then guides me accordingly with a template. Or maybe start with some different assumptions. Almost everyone who creates a rack for the first time thinks that they've created a standalone entity which can then be instantiated as many times as desired with each one acting as a self-contained filter/instrument unto itself. Why not have that be the default state, and let the 'every instance is actually the same rack' weirdness be an advanced option for those who want to go further. Rack Lite(TM) or something.
If nothing else, please give the fumblers like me the option to trap and flag the feedback!
Clearly a lot of folks work wonders with these things. Even with the tutorials, I almost always get zapped the moment I try to 'leave the reservation'. It's never clear to me why it happens and the result is the habit of pretending that racks don't exist and that I will never need them. Am I the only one who still doesn't get it?
Thanks for letting me vent a bit.
