Still annoyed with zoom issues!

[Keni]

Yeah, I know. I'm still here complaining about this.

 

Ever since the switch to silverlight and layers to lanes.

 

Zoom is always a pain when dealing with lanes. If I zoom on a clip on one lane, why would I want to see the TRACK large and lanes small?

 

I spend far too much time constantly adjusting my zoom to get what I want. In the days of layers, it was immediate!

 

I can't be the only one bothered by this yet it is never addressed other than one of my posts!

 

Being forced to complicate my view further seeing the promoted clips when I don't need it makes it all the worse.

 

This continues to be one of my most annoying issues with a program I love!

 

[Grem]

You know Keni, when this happens to me I always think, there is somebody else that complains about this too, but I can never remember who!! Just last night I was working and wishing that the takes lanes could be bigger than the trk lane, which was HUGE!!!

How about this, when you expand the Take Lanes the Parent trk collapses and stays like that till you close the take lanes.

I'm with ya on this one. But I love my take lanes!!

[Keni]

Thanks Grem!

 

I couldn't believe no one else is bothered by this. Thanks for the relief.

 

Some people find it important to see the promoted clips. So to accomodate both preferences, I feel a simple option to disable the track image when lanes are exposed would be a huge help to me. I dislike the confusion of the virtual image simultaneous with the lane-clips.

 

...and the other factor of why should the track size be larger than the clips? Very counter intuitive to me and forces lots of extra fiddling.

 

I know a while back the Bakers managed to increase maximum zoom of lanes, but it's been a long time and this is still not right. If I have 6, 8, 12 lanes and wish to zoom only a few bars of 2 lanes, that,s what I shoukd get. Right now when I try this I get a large track and all the lanes small including lanes I didn't include in the zoom selection.

 

For me, most else is excellent and more stable than I can remember. This remains the biggest "sore spot"...

 

 

[RBH]

I rarely use take lanes myself - But I understand the need for specialized zoom configurations.  I think it would be great if there was a whole new dock ( with track selection)  just for the  selected track, it's automation and or take lanes. I can imagine a full zoom second monitor just for this - because the detail and zoom levels are critical in some applications.

Edited May 25, 2019 by RBH

[chuckebaby]

I feel the same way about Automation lanes. I open up 10 tracks with Automation lanes and I have to manually increase the height on all 10. Total PITA.

Cant expect anyone to do any detail work on a lane that's only 1/8 of an inch (in perspective)

[Keni]

Exactly!

[Grem]

Keni, I am going to go out on a limb here and say that you must have put in a feature request, correct?

 Cause Chuck brought up another of my little niggles, the automation lanes. They are just like the take lanes in tha they are too small. And when you go to do some really detailed work with reverbs, delays, and eq's and such it get's to be, like Chuck says, a PITA when you get a lot of automation lanes on one trk.

[Keni]

Hi Grem...

 

Yes... Probably more than once as it's been years of complaining about this. I believe I've also had chats on the forum with Noel and others about this.

 

I would imagine automation lanes having many of the same difficulties. Funny, but I still find myself editing automation on the track instead of the lanes most of the time. Now thinking about it probably exactly for this reason. Zooming the track gives me expected results instead of lane restricted.

 

I wish I could get away with that for clips, but my methodology dates back to layers and though I've tried handling other ways, layers/lanes is my best option. There are many options that lanes allows which were not available in layers for various reasons. Lanes got cleaned up for most of my issues except for this one glaring limitation which haunts me everyday in all the work I do.

 

Maybe if you and others put in feature requests as well it will rise in importance? Can't hurt?

 

 

[Grem]

48 minutes ago, Keni said:

Maybe if you and others put in feature requests as well it will rise in importance? Can't hurt?

Can't hurt. Consider it done.

[Keni]

?

[chuckebaby]

Im onboard with this as well. Im actually surprised more people haven't mentioned it.

[Starship Krupa]

This is a confusing post. What's silverlight? What switch from layers to lanes?

Cakewalk by BandLab has never had anything called "layers" in all the time I've used it, and I've used it from the first week of its existence in April 2018.

There are some things I don't like about the zooming logic, though, and I agree that the tracks wind up humongous when what I want to focus on is the clip or automation I'm working on.

I can't figure out the logic of the horizontal zooming either, so I always wind up zooming in way to the left or right of where I want. I thought it might zoom centered on the Now Time, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I just try to figure out which way CbB seems to want to go and try to "cheat" it in that direction so that I wind up somewhere near where I intended.

It also drives me nuts that there's no command to zoom to the horizontal extent of a project without also filling the screen with the project vertically at the same time. So if I have a project with 2 tracks and execute the Fit Project to Screen command I wind up with these HUGE tracks.

[msmcleod]

1 hour ago, Starship Krupa said:

This is a confusing post. What's silverlight? What switch from layers to lanes?

Silverlight is actually Microsoft's attempt at something like flash, but I think Keni means skylight interface - i.e. the Cakewalk GUI, which was introduced in Sonar X1.

Layers is what Sonar used prior to X1 (Sonar 8.53 and below).

I found the transition from Sonar 8.53 to X1 a bit of a learning curve too, and the change to the skylight interface & layers to takes were probably the main things. IMO they're both an improvement, but they did take getting used to.

[Grem]

8 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I thought it might zoom centered on the Now Time, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

This is what it does. Zooms in on the Now Time as Center. It does for me. That's how I work. 

 

[Edit] I must add that I use Ctrl+arrow keys instinctively to zoom in and out.

Edited May 28, 2019 by Grem

[marcL]

6 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I can't figure out the logic of the horizontal zooming either, so I always wind up zooming in way to the left or right of where I want. I thought it might zoom centered on the Now Time, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I just try to figure out which way CbB seems to want to go and try to "cheat" it in that direction so that I wind up somewhere near where I intended.

It also drives me nuts that there's no command to zoom to the horizontal extent of a project without also filling the screen with the project vertically at the same time. So if I have a project with 2 tracks and execute the Fit Project to Screen command I wind up with these HUGE tracks. 

I use the Alt+MouseWheel for quick horizontal zooms. To make this possible I changed "(Track) Options > Mouse Wheel Zoom Options", i.e. I set Horizontal to a chosen value (e.g. 1,5) and Vertical to 1. This does it perfectly for me! NOTE: With this the zoom is not centered to the now time, but the cursor position!

[Keni]

Thanks for the correction Msmcleod!

 

You are correct.

 

It took me some time to adjust to lanes, but all is well now... except for the issues of lane zooming and viewing of promoted clips on the track itself.

 

I expect to see only what I selected when I zoom... and when I'm editing clips, seeing the promoted/track image is far more confusing to my eye than helpful. I hope they at least offer an option to disable promoted clip image while lanes are displayed!

 

[mettelus]

10 hours ago, Grem said:

12 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I thought it might zoom centered on the Now Time, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

This is what it does. Zooms in on the Now Time as Center. It does for me. That's how I work. 

This is correct with one caveat... when there isn't enough lead material to the left of the now time, the now time will drift center while zooming in, and left while zooming out, but the center of the zoom is still on the now time. That repositioning is the awkward part.

[Starship Krupa]

On 5/28/2019 at 4:32 AM, msmcleod said:

Silverlight is actually Microsoft's attempt at something like flash, but I think Keni means skylight interface - i.e. the Cakewalk GUI, which was introduced in Sonar X1.

Layers is what Sonar used prior to X1 (Sonar 8.53 and below).

I found the transition from Sonar 8.53 to X1 a bit of a learning curve too, and the change to the skylight interface & layers to takes were probably the main things. IMO they're both an improvement, but they did take getting used to.

Yeah, I know about that Silverlight.

"Skylight" is the name for the system with all the collapsible and docking windows, then. I just think of it as "Cakewalk." ?

And Keni must be a Sonar old, old timer.

I don't know anything about Sonar's  layers, but lanes systems seem to be the DAW standard for compositing and I am glad that Cakewalk has them rather than something else. It made it way easier to transition, and I know that my Pro Tools user friend who sat down cold in front of Cakewalk and knocked out a song in 2 days was helped by the fact that Cakewalk uses a lanes system for comping.

I feel your pain on the transition, though. There have been some nasty bugs addressed in the Take Lanes system, according to the release notes, which means that it must have been rough on first release. There's still one that messes my clip lengths up when loop recording multiple audio tracks. I have to drag the ends out on a couple of them if I stop the recording before the end of the loop. It may have put people off from the lanes system in general.

Also, Speed Comping is really confusing at first, with its automatic muting and all that. It took me a long time to sort it out before I got hold of a copy of the old Ref. Guide. I can see where it can be quick and handy for some workflows, but I still haven't incorporated it yet and I'd like to be able to turn off some of its features. It's too easy to get into trouble with it, especially if I have clips grouped.

As I've seen people gripe about "take lanes" I've wondered how much of what they really dislike is Take Lanes as such and how much of it is the other features (some buggy) that came with take lanes. For instance, it drives me batsnot that my takes get cut up into clips where I don't want them to. I finally learned how to "heal" them with the comping tool, but why? I'm still not 100% sure what's expected behavior there. The Ref. Guide doesn't mention it.

[Keni]

Yeah, I'm an old timer. Cakewalk for Windows 1.0....

I've seen many changes.

 

Layers and Lanes are very similar more than not. I believe Cakewalk was the first to offer this type of feature. Layers had plenty of bugs/issues too. We lost and gained in the tranition. In the long run we've gained many features some of which I even use, but we lost these basic items which happen to be very fundamentally difficult for me. To be fair, I know the Bakers have addressed this issue a little, but after so many years I truly expected it to be cleaned up by now.

 

Zoom? Whatever I select should be what I get. That's somewhat obvious, yes?

The other item is seeing the track image (promoted clips) while editing on Lanes. Not only is this essentially useless for me. I can't count how often that image confuses my eyes making the editing more difficult.

 

[Starship Krupa]

Cakewalk for Windows 1.0? Whoa.

Yeah, I always click the little double arrow in the Track Header to minimize the track image when I'm working in the Lanes. I trust that you do that? I find it helps.

It would be nice if that would happen automatically when the Expand Lanes button is pressed. I have messed myself up by performing operations on the Track Image that I meant to perform on a Take Lane, and that's its own Special Cakewalk Horror.

A feature that I haven't submitted because I'm 99% sure it's already been submitted is horizontal Zoom to Selection, like Audacity has.

Audacity has some convenient features that I pine for in other audio programs. The way that their selections just automatically become loop points and vice versa, and the way that you can adjust the selection points by dragging them, man, do I ever wish that all of my audio programs had that. When I first got Mixcraft I kept dialing these perfect drum loops using their loop markers before remembering that it was a dead end, there was no direct way to convert a loop selection to a crop selection or any other kind of selection.