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I’m actually quite impressed with how Ableton came up with a UI that didn’t exist about 20 years ago and then stuck to it without trying to be all things to all

by bborud 6y ago

I’m actually quite impressed with how Ableton came up with a UI that didn’t exist about 20 years ago and then stuck to it without trying to be all things to all people. The hardest thing to do is to say no. What’s even more impressive is that they did not start out doing any user research. They made what they wanted and (pardon the pun) it struck a chord. If they had not had the courage to trust their instinct, but had done what so many designers do and focus on satisfying only the needs users can imagine and articulate, I think they would have made yet another Cubase or Protools lookalike. That’s a crowded market and they wouldn’t have made it. Sure, I understand and agree with your criticism, but there are probably great tools that do what you ask for cleaner and better because those tools are designed around different ideas. If they can squeeze this in and make it work: great. If they can’t, that’s okay too.

aldanor 6y ago
That's all understandable and I agree that they had the courage to go the 'other direction' and succeeded in doing so. And that's part of what makes Live special and what makes it fun to use, which I do on daily basis. But for professional use, you do end up with a hundred or a few hundred track lanes in your projects, and mixing and tweaking the whole thing becomes an unavoidable disastrous chore. If I understand this correctly, they planned on introducing it in Live 8 (hence a hidden flag in Options.txt which sort-of enables a preview of this feature but is extremely buggy), but it never fully worked out because they also introduced Racks with nested tree-like flow of plugins, which doesn't play well with a conventional matrix-like mixer view. That being said, I believe most pro users would be happy with a simplified solution like "if you fork a chain in a rack, its branches won't be shown in the mixer", which would cover the 95% of other simple use cases like, seeing where your compressors are at a glance without having to click on each track a hundred times... There's many such things - like proper multi-screen support (e.g. with 3+ screens), which, hypothetically, could also couple well with a separate-window mixer view where they could introduce chain branching and all that (and become the first DAW to do that!). For pro use, there's lots of features like this that may sound boring but end up hampering your workflow a lot. It may not be as fun-sounding as 'yet another cool phaser bitcrusher spectral distortion plugin' but the reality is, professional users that they supposedly aim at do require core functionality that's been missing since the start.

by bborud 6y ago

aldanor 6y ago

That's all understandable and I agree that they had the courage to go the 'other direction' and succeeded in doing so. And that's part of what makes Live special and what makes it fun to use, which I do on daily basis. But for professional use, you do end up with a hundred or a few hundred track lanes in your projects, and mixing and tweaking the whole thing becomes an unavoidable disastrous chore. If I understand this correctly, they planned on introducing it in Live 8 (hence a hidden flag in Options.txt which sort-of enables a preview of this feature but is extremely buggy), but it never fully worked out because they also introduced Racks with nested tree-like flow of plugins, which doesn't play well with a conventional matrix-like mixer view. That being said, I believe most pro users would be happy with a simplified solution like "if you fork a chain in a rack, its branches won't be shown in the mixer", which would cover the 95% of other simple use cases like, seeing where your compressors are at a glance without having to click on each track a hundred times... There's many such things - like proper multi-screen support (e.g. with 3+ screens), which, hypothetically, could also couple well with a separate-window mixer view where they could introduce chain branching and all that (and become the first DAW to do that!). For pro use, there's lots of features like this that may sound boring but end up hampering your workflow a lot. It may not be as fun-sounding as 'yet another cool phaser bitcrusher spectral distortion plugin' but the reality is, professional users that they supposedly aim at do require core functionality that's been missing since the start.