Zoom Frustrations

[Keni]

I really find it hard to believe I'm the only person continually bothered by this.

I've been complaining about it since silverlight was introduced.

It is constantly in my face as it is used so often. Much like touching your face. You do it all day long.

I spend far too much time mousing around to adjust my view.

Is it really too much to ask for? Pre silverlight we had this and though there has been some improvement since, it is still a far cry from good.

All I'm asking for is to see the area I select via lasso to zoom to fill the pane. Regardless of being track or lane data. No quantizing, no second guessing!

This has to be one of the most fundamental tools we work with!

 

PLEASE! (Excuse the scream. Too many years of frustration built in)

 

 

[JoseC]

Press Z to select the Zoom tool. Lasso select the area you want to zoom to. Done. Press Z again to unselect the tool. ALT -Z to undo zoom. OR keep Z pressed while you lasso select to temporarily select the Zoom Tool.

[chris.r]

I have a trackball with a big ring around the ball for scrolling. It's a perfect idea but it doesn't work for me when zooming. I always expect it to work in the opposite direction, and when I'm close to the song start when doing it (wrong) again - I mean I try to zoom in but zoom out occurs - then I loose my position because the view is shifted towards the song start but if I try to instantly undo it by zooming in, the view doesn't come back to the previous position anymore and I'm screwed.

That's my zoom frustration.

Edited August 6, 2020 by chris.r

[Keni]

Thanks Guys...

 

I'm very familiar with our assorted zoom tools. My issues are not with the toolset, but with the results.

All is well if you stick to zooming tracks. The problems are all related to zoom and Lanes.

 

For me, I've long ago accepted lanes (vs. layers) and other than zoom issues for it I could easily move on.

Look at what results of a zoom in lanes. Instead of getting what I ask for, I get some never comfortable "interpretation" of my lasso. Sometimes I don’t even get any lanes instead having a full screen track.

Complicating this even more is the confusion between the track portion (above the lanes) and the lanes. I rarely want to see ANY data in the track while Lanes are exposed. The promoted clips are obvious in each lane by their color/highlighting. A constant visual annoyance!

 

I'm becoming more sure this is due to some complication of how silverlight handles the subset (lanes) along with parent (track). I just can’t believe after a decade (?) a solution hasn't been found and no one else is bothered. All other issues aside, this single, major item is still in my face everyday... all day and all of the night!

 

 

[Base 57]

19 minutes ago, Keni said:

Look at what results of a zoom in lanes. Instead of getting what I ask for, I get some never comfortable "interpretation" of my lasso. Sometimes I don’t even get any lanes instead having a full screen track.

I can't duplicate this. 

However, I do find it annoying that Zoom expands all of the lanes in a track.

[Keni]

26 minutes ago, Base 57 said:

I can't duplicate this. 

However, I do find it annoying that Zoom expands all of the lanes in a track.

You just did! You tried to expand specific lane(s) portions and instead got something else!

I guess if that's what you’re used to, you might not think of it but many of us old timers remember when this was not the case. An area zoomed is what you got.

 

As for the "promoted" track image. I doubt there's anyone out there who hasn’t had their eyes confused looking at multiple tracks of Lanes with the extra promoted/track simultaneously!

 

[Keni]

Does anyone else ever edit Lanes in more than one track simultaneously?

 

Try to zoom a few lanes on both tracks simultaneously and tell me what you get?

[Base 57]

1 hour ago, Keni said:

many of us old timers remember

I bought into Cakewalk when it came on a 3.5 inch floppy disk and I loaded it onto a Huge 40mb hard drive. But I've been using the current lanes for so long I could not remember how layers worked. So I opened SONAR 8 (which seems to run very well on this W10 machine) and reminded myself of the difference between lanes and layers.

@Keni, you can now consider me a convert to your cause. The way layers are displayed in SONAR 8 should definitely be an option in CbB. I know less than nothing about writing code so maybe it's not something that can be done easily. If that is the case it would be nice if the bakers would just say so. You have been complaining about this for a long time and the silence from their end has been deafening.

[Keni]

4 minutes ago, Base 57 said:

I bought into Cakewalk when it came on a 3.5 inch floppy disk and I loaded it onto a Huge 40mb hard drive. But I've been using the current lanes for so long I could not remember how layers worked. So I opened SONAR 8 (which seems to run very well on this W10 machine) and reminded myself of the difference between lanes and layers.

@Keni, you can now consider me a convert to your cause. The way layers are displayed in SONAR 8 should definitely be an option in CbB. I know less than nothing about writing code so maybe it's not something that can be done easily. If that is the case it would be nice if the bakers would just say so. You have been complaining about this for a long time and the silence from their end has been deafening.

Thanks Base57.

 

Nice to find another believer. Mind you know though I would love that, I no longer even try to fight it. There are many new features they've added to Lanes that are not available with Layers and are important in many other situations. I’m only trying to regain what was lost and it's mostly two items. These zoom issues and the display of promoted clips on the track while Lanes are visible. You can see I've again posted that in a separate thread.

 

The zoom issue is by far the more important, but the promoted clips issue I don't think difficult to implement.

 

These issues have been all-day/night difficulties for me since silverlight and Lanes. How many years?

 

Not headline grabbing new features, but incredibly settling and fulfilling to many users!

 

[Josh Wolfer]

By your description, I'm not following. If you take a video of the behavior, I"m happy to chime in. I do a ton of zooming in and out and don't have too many frustrations with it. So maybe my workflow is just different. But I'd like to understand

 

[Keni]

15 minutes ago, Josh Wolfer said:

By your description, I'm not following. If you take a video of the behavior, I"m happy to chime in. I do a ton of zooming in and out and don't have too many frustrations with it. So maybe my workflow is just different. But I'd like to understand

 

Hi Josh. I can’t make a vid at the moment but some instances are easy to see. Open Lanes on two adjacent tracks and try to zoom lanes (use zoom lasso) from both simultaneously. Or a simpler version. Zoom a small area of a few lanes on a track that has many lanes.

 

 Thanks for looking into this.

[petemus]

My zoom frustration is not having a "Fit tracks horizontally" command. The vertical fit command seems to exist. It might well be I'm just being bling again and just not finding it anywhere.

Having a bit smaller zoom jumps with Ctrl + Left and Ctrl + Right would also be nice. The way it's now is very coarse.

Edited August 7, 2020 by petemus

[Xoo]

No argument from me!

[Canopus]

1 hour ago, petemus said:

My zoom frustration is not having a "Fit tracks horizontally" command.

Have you tried Shift+F?

[petemus]

15 minutes ago, Canopus said:

Have you tried Shift+F?

That also fits the tracks horizontally, doesn't it? I'd like just horizontal fit...

[Starship Krupa]

1 hour ago, Canopus said:

Have you tried Shift+F?

That is not what he is talking about.

What he is talking about is one of those fundamental "good lord how can these people live like this" features that when Mixcraft was my primary I nearly wore the paint off my "0" key I used it so often and couldn't find when I tried Cakewalk. Every big program has (or rather lacks) at least one or two.

(When I first started using Mixcraft they had just casually removed its ability to add a marker on the fly with a single keystroke. Which....um, I pretty much do it that way about 9 times out of 10, because I use markers for marking where flubs/edits are in takes and other on-the-fly things like that. Somebody got me going by helping me map a MIDI event to it, but whoa. I joined their beta program and the feature was returned for the next major version with the help of my plaintive cries)

He's talking about a command that will zoom in or out to show the horizontal extent of the project (that is, from the beginning to where you go when you hit Ctrl-B) without affecting the vertical zoom. The use case for this is as follows: I am zoomed way way in to do some surgical clip editing, I've zoomed in and scooted over and zoomed back out a little and back in so many times I barely even remember where the heck I am along the timeline. I want to keep working on this track/clip/lane, so I'm going to pull back and see just where I am in the project along the timeline, get an overview, see if I missed anything, without disturbing the track and lane heights I have comfortably adjusted.

Or, simpler, maybe I have everything in closed folders except one or two tracks, and if I Shift+F I'll get a screen with Attack of the 50 Foot Waveforms.

I feature requested this on the old forum back in April 2018 and was told by two friendly users that CbB already had such a command, and they both told me about the command that zooms both the width and height. Even though I thought I was pretty explicit about stating the "no vertical resizing" part.

(I wonder if it's like coming to a beach town and asking for directions to the fishing pier where the platypuses dance. People just smile politely and point in the direction of the fishing pier, because they want to be helpful and you asked them for something that sounded 75% reasonable and 25% WTF are you talking about)

Now, I, on the other hand, have little use for a command that messes with my track heights when all I wanted to do was pull back to an overview of the timeline after doing close work. Maybe there are only 4 or 5 tracks in the whole project so far, and if I hit that "fit project" command, the track heights are going to grow to a giant height, or I have a lot of tracks, and I "fit project" and the track I'm working on shrinks down to a tiny little stripe. I don't want that, not now, hardly ever. Maybe in between demos at a trade show, or right before I save and exit, to tidy things up, but as part of my workflow, I can't see using it all that much. Nice that it's there, but much less useful to me.

(For anyone who still doesn't get it, think of vertically resizing every track in your project to fit on the screen as "with ice cream." Now that might seem silly, who doesn't love ice cream? And who doesn't want to be able to view all their tracks top to bottom as well as left to right? But what if "it" was matzoh ball soup? That wouldn't be good with ice cream in it. Or Ethiopian injera bread? Delicious, but with ice cream on top? None for me, thanks! So for those of us who only want to fit our projects horizontally, that's like ordering matzoh ball soup. But when our tracks always get resized vertically along with it, that's like getting a scoop of ice cream dumped in our soup just as it's brought to the table. Ewww. Waiter, I'd like a feature request!?)

[petemus]

5 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

That is not what he is talking about.

What he is talking about is one of those fundamental "good lord how can these people live like this" features that when Mixcraft was my primary I nearly wore the paint off my "0" key I used it so often and couldn't find when I tried Cakewalk. Every big program has (or rather lacks) at least one or two.

(When I first started using Mixcraft they had just casually removed its ability to add a marker on the fly with a single keystroke. Which....um, I pretty much do it that way about 9 times out of 10, because I use markers for marking where flubs/edits are in takes and other on-the-fly things like that. Somebody got me going by helping me map a MIDI event to it, but whoa. I joined their beta program and the feature was returned for the next major version with the help of my plaintive cries)

He's talking about a command that will zoom in or out to show the horizontal extent of the project (that is, from the beginning to where you go when you hit Ctrl-B) without affecting the vertical zoom. The use case for this is as follows: I am zoomed way way in to do some surgical clip editing, I've zoomed in and scooted over and zoomed back out a little and back in so many times I barely even remember where the heck I am along the timeline. I want to keep working on this track/clip/lane, so I'm going to pull back and see just where I am in the project along the timeline, get an overview, see if I missed anything, without disturbing the track and lane heights I have comfortably adjusted.

Or, simpler, maybe I have everything in closed folders except one or two tracks, and if I Shift+F I'll get a screen with Attack of the 50 Foot Waveforms.

I feature requested this on the old forum back in April 2018 and was told by two friendly users that CbB already had such a command, and they both told me about the command that zooms both the width and height. Even though I thought I was pretty explicit about stating the "no vertical resizing" part.

(I wonder if it's like coming to a beach town and asking for directions to the fishing pier where the platypuses dance. People just smile politely and point in the direction of the fishing pier, because they want to be helpful and you asked them for something that sounded 75% reasonable and 25% WTF are you talking about)

Now, I, on the other hand, have little use for a command that messes with my track heights when all I wanted to do was pull back to an overview of the timeline after doing close work. Maybe there are only 4 or 5 tracks in the whole project so far, and if I hit that "fit project" command, the track heights are going to grow to a giant height, or I have a lot of tracks, and I "fit project" and the track I'm working on shrinks down to a tiny little stripe. I don't want that, not now, hardly ever. Maybe in between demos at a trade show, or right before I save and exit, to tidy things up, but as part of my workflow, I can't see using it all that much. Nice that it's there, but much less useful to me.

(For anyone who still doesn't get it, think of vertically resizing every track in your project to fit on the screen as "with ice cream." Now that might seem silly, who doesn't love ice cream? And who doesn't want to be able to view all their tracks top to bottom as well as left to right? But what if "it" was matzoh ball soup? That wouldn't be good with ice cream in it. Or Ethiopian injera bread? Delicious, but with ice cream on top? None for me, thanks! So for those of us who only want to fit our projects horizontally, that's like ordering matzoh ball soup. But when our tracks always get resized vertically along with it, that's like getting a scoop of ice cream dumped in our soup just as it's brought to the table. Ewww. Waiter, I'd like a feature request!?)

Ditto!

[Starship Krupa]

Okay, hooray, everybody, as of this Early Access drop, there is now a command for horizontal-only resizing to fit the project width. Look for Zoom To Fit Project Horizontally. They did a fantastic job of implementing it, it does the same thing whether you are zoomed out to kingdom come or zoomed in to little bitty ticks.

There's no default key binding, so you'll have to do your own or put it on the Custom Module. Mine's on the "." key because it was the most convenient unused key.

Not precisely the lasso zoom that @Keni was asking for, but I think it will be a MAJOR convenience.

[murat k.]

 

On 8/6/2020 at 4:56 PM, Keni said:

All I'm asking for is to see the area I select via lasso to zoom to fill the pane.

I recommend you to use Cakefolk™. Use the Right Click Selection on the Time Ruler with it.

[Keni]

18 minutes ago, murat k. said:

 

I recommend you to use Cakefolk™. Use the Right Click Selection on the Time Ruler with it.

I don’t understand. What am I missing?