Which are the "most" normal looking DAWs?

[woggle]

The reason why Tracktion's gui isn't for everybody isn't really how it looks, it's that Tracktion does not have a horizontal mixer option, and it's hard for some to adjust to mixing vertically.

But why is it more "normal/familair" to have a mixer horizontal instead of vertically?

That is kind of the whole point of the OP, what kind of DAWs has made a mixer horizontally "normal"

the horizontal mixer is just a hangover from hardware - makes no sense at all to me in software where the link between track and meters can be explicit

This part Tracktion got right. Making the linkage explicit is better human factors. It is one less cognitive computation that has to be performed. Problem is now you have no immediate relative understanding of metering between tracks which adds a new cognitive step.

What I don't understand is if you made the vertical mixer deliberately with explicit track linkage to metering in mind, why would you not understand that in order not to exchange one problem for another, you clearly need to rotate the volume filters (meters) 90 degrees clockwise?

Not being a Tracktion user I did not know they had vertical meters. I have made the same request / observation for Reaper, where the default themes do not allow for a sensible horizontal meter. In fact I remember years ago the user base arguing for the vertical meters coz that is what they were familiar with from hardware - even though the context was different. Arguing to good HCI and UX to the Reaper base will meet significant resistance as one of the major attractions for some active users is the poor UI design/ need for tweaking / scripting etc.

[thecontrolcentre]

Not being a Tracktion user I did not know they had vertical meters. I have made the same request / observation for Reaper, where the default themes do not allow for a sensible horizontal meter. In fact I remember years ago the user base arguing for the vertical meters coz that is what they were familiar with from hardware - even though the context was different.

So ... like the Session view in Live?

[woggle]

that session view makes sense - as do some of the trackers I think where they have that vertical track layout. I can understand the reasoning for vertical meters in a horizontal track view - it mirrors the amplitude of the wavform. The problem is that vertical meters make comparisons between multiple tracks difficult ion that sort of view

[brisket]

I agree it makes more sense for the mixer and the tracks to be aligned in the same direction.
I happen to prefer vertical - a big reason why I prefer working in Bitwig's clip launcher than its arranger, and why I like Renoise. To have music scrolling vertically just makes more sense to me somehow. There's a newish tracker called Radium that even displays audio tracks as vertical waveforms, which is great. There's no particular reason why it shouldn't be like that.

[dzilizzi]

Reason, of course! Because which other DAW comes with its own rack of equipment?

[acYm]

I can't name a single daw on the market that doesn't come with a full suite of effects, a few synths and a sampler, just like reason does. to me its integrated graphical rack format doesn't make it particularly special at all.

[dzilizzi]

I wasn't talking about the fact that it comes with effects and instruments. We were talking about the "looks" No other DAW I've seen has the main window as an old fashioned rack of equipment that you can flip around and wire.