elemental wrote:Yes, something like this ... as live was written for Live use, and now is being widely used for productiion, perhaps a switch slider to move balance priorities differently according to the situation. Or is this moving too much towards 2 seperate apps???
i think part of the problem here is something i've noticed but havent heard many other people comment on here in the forum. and that is: a lot of the problems with this program would be solved by allowing more options. but:
ableton seem dead set against this in most cases for design philosophy reasons. this is to avoid the "feature bloat" of cubase and logic etc ..
the idea seems to be to stay true to thier "one size fits all", flexible, live performance roots and distinguish from the competition.
and to a degree this is great, it makes a lot of things possible, quick intuitive writing, flexible routing, ideally it should keep the footprint of the application low etc etc.etc . BUT:
its not really working out so well anymore, is it?
a small application size without efficient resource management is defeating the purpose. i'd rather have a DAW that has a somewhat larger EXE basic RAM requirments that performs efficiently, than a small one that doesnt.
right? i mean hypothetically if thats what it took than thats what should probably be done
also:
once they made the decision to move toward making it a full fledged production environment - and not just a revolutionary audio app for live performance ... suddenly you are moving into a different area with different requirements.
now its a program in which all the things it needs to handle, and allow for all the different ways of working (live PA, DJ, production, arranging, recording etc)
cannot be done with the same "one size fits all" approach anymore
ie its that old saying "you cant have your cake and eat it too" - which from my perspective is exactly what they - or at least some people inside the company - are still trying to do.
if you are trying to do it all in one application - with a minium of options - i think you have to make up your mind whether to focus your priorities on
Live performance (PA, DJ)
or Studio production
then once you make that decision, you can plan your features accordingly. because obviously the requirements are different and if you try one way without options, you are wrecking things for half of your users. this is being born out in so many cases ...
example: handling of the "orange dot" being a major example of that as well, and its still not working logically. because the position of the start marker, requirements are different depending on whether your playing live or writing.
its either focus on one or the other, or finally cave in and start adding more options to accomodate both halves of the user base with a program that is flexible enough to configure for both.
how difficult would it be to add a small button near the clip view that allows you to switch start marker behavior? i dont know, but its certainly not a case of thier not being enough room for one more little switch. there are tons of examples like this but they dont seem to be receptive to solutions like this
anyway i think you either have to make up your mind you are going to start allowing more options .. OR ... you split the product line into two seperate lines. which is another way to do it, but no matter what they do i do think something needs to be done because the current way is causing a lot of problems for a lot of people.
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... Of course that's a simplification for the sake of making an impact in the presentation -- but there's also something very genuine and true to the nature of Live in that statement. Live enables you to experiment, mangle, slice, twist and have some creative fun with your projects. Now, if a simple, single drag operation takes five to ten times the time you thought you'd realize your whole idea in... 
