Track Header Icons - why the border on some types? [SOLVED]

[Colin Nicholls]

This has always bothered me somewhat, but I've been tweaking my theme and I finally decided to ask this question here:

Why do some track types overlay (underlay?) a grey box on the track header icon? It seems that "Instrument", "Synth" , and "MIDI" tracks that are directed to a VSTi  are affected:

It seems sad that the beautiful, clean "Instrument" and "Synth" track icons will never be displayed in the Track View as cleanly as the "Audio" and un-bound "MIDI" track icons.

Just for kicks I changed the instrument header icon to a blue rectangle with a completely transparent background, and re-loaded:

What is the benefit of having this extra grey border or background?

 

Concerning MIDI tracks:

Interestingly, if I switch the output on Track 5 to direct to a hardware MIDI output, the border vanishes, looking just like the icon on Track 2:

So, there is clearly some logic controlling the border display, to do with output destination. Is there anywhere that this is documented?

Personally, I'm not a fan of the border, and especially when tweaking the icons to look their best in a custom theme.

 

[Colin Nicholls]

At the risk of getting tedious, OK, so I don't usually have "Show Icons" ticked for Track Strips but I can see that when I do enable them, I don't see the border effect on the icons themselves, just the header icons.

However, as shown in the screenshot from page 751 in the PDF documentation (see below), the header icons don't appear to have the border in the version that the doc screenshot was taken from:

Edited August 24, 2019 by Colin Nicholls

[msmcleod]

So after a bit of experimenting...

MIDI tracks that go to a real MIDI port don't have a border on them.

MIDI tracks or instrument tracks that go to a soft synth do.

Audio tracks routed to a hardware audio device (which will be 99% of the time) also don't have a border on them.

I suspect that audio tracks that are sent to the input of a soft synth that accepts audio will end up having a border on them too... but I can't find any instruments I've got installed at the moment that have that facility.

So in summary, if the output is going to something "internal" then it's got a border around it, otherwise it's not. 

[Colin Nicholls]

1 hour ago, msmcleod said:

So in summary, if the output is going to something "internal" then it's got a border around it, otherwise it's not.  

That's what I'm seeing too. Could be useful. Thanks for testing.

[Colin Nicholls]

I figured it out. It's not a "border".  The icon is sitting on top of a button.

If you hover the mouse over the icon, it lights up, indicating that you can click it in order to display the UI for the VSTi. This works for MIDI tracks that are driving the VSTi, so the button is available under the MIDI track header icon as well.

This behavior is described - with an accurate screen shot of the header icons - on page 754 of the documentation. The fact that the icon is rendered as a BUTTON and not as a simple ICON is not highlighted in the text, but is consistent. And of course, I'd rather that clickable items are obviously clickable (i.e. they look like buttons and hover-highlight) than be un-discoverable, plain vanilla flat graphic.

Of course I knew that you can click on the header icon to bring up the UI, but I had partitioned this knowledge away from considering the visual appearance of the icon, in "theme design mode".  Duh!

Bakers: 1, Colin: 0