WHen I rename a track, rename the file
When I rename a track, rename the underlying wav file to match. This could be an optional behavior depending on settings or user confirmation.
Also, since the timeline display of the track name is very small, use a mouseover event to display the full track name in a bubble.
- Leo
Hi leotohill:
It was way back in the v2.xx days… Mabey, 3-4 Board builds, back… There was a discussion regarding Track Library Improvment/revamping, and all… I suggested a couple of ideas in that thread, but interest in working on Archival/Track/Path Assignments, and all, never seemed to take on any importance… or float to the upper ends of improving Track Nameing…
I’d like to see those ideas expanded to widening out the archival of tracks to include gettin n-Track to “Stream” tracks from from more than one, and possibly several Hard Drives… at-one-time… This would cause the “Streamming” of files in the READ/WRITE mode of Tracking to more than ONE Hard Drive “PEN”… For Example… All the Tubs could be written on One drive… all the Vocals could be written on another drive… and-so-on… This might lessen the “Stress” of one drive “Pen” doing all the Track Streaming of the Time-Line… I don’t know how that would affect Latency 
But it would be interesting to see how several drives would “Combo-Up” in Streaming Tracks…???
Got any thoughts about that concept? … All you computer Neards?
Bill…
I agree with Leo. The track renaming is somewhat cumbersome. Not quite torture 
, but a change there would be nice.
| Quote (leotohill @ July 18 2005,19:29) |
| When I rename a track, rename the underlying wav file to match. This could be an optional behavior depending on settings or user confirmation. Also, since the timeline display of the track name is very small, use a mouseover event to display the full track name in a bubble. |
Here’s another vote for both.
Another refinement for the timeline display of names: some kind of floating name tag would be nice for those moments you edit, say group volume evolutions. nTS displays the curves superimposed to the first tracks, and if you zoom to an area that doesn’t start from zero, the name of the group track disappears.
And the name tags should have also the name given to the group (or whatever). “Volume for Group 3: Guitars” is much less confusing than “Group 3 Volume”.
Of course, I’d like to remind of my old request for individual pan for both tracks of a stereo track, a polarity switch and such, even though I found a freebie plugin for these from KVR: Stereo Tools by Kelly Industries.
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| Quote (leotohill @ July 18 2005,19:29) When I rename a track, rename the underlying wav file to match. This could be an optional behavior depending on settings or user confirmation. Also, since the timeline display of the track name is very small, use a mouseover event to display the full track name in a bubble. Here’s another vote for both. Another refinement for the timeline display of names: some kind of floating name tag would be nice for those moments you edit, say group volume evolutions. nTS displays the curves superimposed to the first tracks, and if you zoom to an area that doesn’t start from zero, the name of the group track disappears. And the name tags should have also the name given to the group (or whatever). “Volume for Group 3: Guitars” is much less confusing than “Group 3 Volume”. Of course, I’d like to remind of my old request for individual pan for both tracks of a stereo track, a polarity switch and such, even though I found a freebie plugin for these from KVR: Stereo Tools by Kelly Industries. |
And here’s a vote for all three!
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| Of course, I’d like to remind of my old request for individual pan for both tracks of a stereo track, a polarity switch and such, even though I found a freebie plugin for these from KVR: Stereo Tools by Kelly Industries. |
I needed this the other day - a stereo track that was too “wide” and I wanted to pan the left & right a bit closer together. I was thinking of making a request, but Mwah you beat me to it. Thanks too for the heads up on the Stereo Tools. Will be giving those a try later.
Mark
Hi Guys:
What a great topic… There has been many discussions written about stereo imaging… And everyone seems to have their own ides as to what stereo imaging…is…
Ii KkNnOoWw… lol… It’s getting Off Topic… hehe… 
Imagine, if you were playing with your band/group, a trio or quartette on a stage… The image you hear there is quite different than what you would hear if you were listening to the group in the third row, front-and-center… Or for any other seat in the room, for that matter… But that is why the third row, front-and-center is the most sought after seat in the hall…
A good sounding group with expirenced musicians, knows how to project their instrument, to their audience… The sound of the group, on the stage, in most cases, sounds just awful… In my expirence… the musicians should have the ability to know what their instrument sounds like 60-70% of the distance down the room they are playing, in…
From the Mixer’s point of view, any sound that falls outside the 30 deg. angle/image is outside the TWO-Speaker idea of what a stereo mix is…
However… with this 5.1 6.1 and 7.1 image, that has changed where the Sweet-Spot is, in relation to where the Sweet-Spot is… in the Mix…
But… The Long-and-the-Short of it is… If your unable to hear the other speaker/speakers in the room where you creat your mix…when you are standing, Back-On…in front of any one of the speakers, in your set-up… then the Stereo Image is propably not correct… Well…
Bill…
Speaking from a listeners perspective, I HATE really WIDE stereo mixes. They don’t sound realistic at all to me. I do enjoy panning tricks used sparingly though such as call-left, response-right kinds of things.
That’s just me though… and hey, what do I know?
TG
I’ll point out that if the .sng file format is opened up, I and others could write some useful utilities that address the track-wave matching issue. For example imagine a display that shows each track in a .sng, the corresponding wav file name, and and indicator of whether that wav appears in other .sngs.
User actions could include:
1) click one button to make the file name match the track name, or vice-versa.
2) change a track or file name.
3) click to show a list of the other .sngs in which the wav file appears.
Opening up the .sng file format could open up an after-market for nTrack enhancements from other developers. If I did anything, I’d like offer it as Open Source and free.
- Leo
What should the “rename track renames file” feature do when there are multiple parts in the track from different wave files with little in common in the file names? Or should this feature work only when only one file is used in the track.
What if the same file in that track is used in parts in other tracks? Should the rename still take place, or should it take place if and only if there is only one file in the track, and that file does not appear in other tracks?
BTW, there is a polarity switch, in the EQ section. For a track with only mono WAVE files, you have to check “expand mono track to stereo” in order to control left and right side polarity independently. (You have to do this in order to get stereo effects on the track as well, in case you didn’t know.)
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| Opening up the .sng file format could open up an after-market for nTrack enhancements from other developers. |
i second this!.. i’ve looked into the format, but not much luck… using a hex editor, i was hoping to find some pattern to parse out all of the names of the wave files associated with a song and write a simple little app to organize and rename them… however, i haven’t paid much attention to the license agreement included with the app… if it says no, then i’ll have to give up… but if flavio would open up the format, that would be wonderful… or better yet, move to an entirely xml based format… even if he decides against, i’m still a fan of the application…
bill, concerning reading tracks from different drives, do you mean different physical volumes or different partitions… i’ve not tried either, honestly… but i am running a pair of 15K SCSI drives in RAID 0 configuration… the performance is fantastic… many new performance boards are offering SATA RAID 1 and 0 right on the board… now, though, i’m wondering if you could just record a track, then use the “rename/move wave file” command to move it to another drive… although i hope someone will add some thoughts, i can’t see how using different partitions on the same drive will offer any benefit, as the drive head still has to seek out the sectors…
isaac
a feature i like in some other audio programs is the storing of multiple “versions” or “edits” of a song in a single project file. i use the option to have n-track automatically name my wav files as i record new tracks/takes. i like the speed of this. however, i am always backing up my .sng files by doing a “save as…” and calling it “song name - v1.sng”, “song name - v2.sng”, etc… this leaves for oddly named wav files. i do this so i can go back to an older mix of the sng file if i screw something up, or find my changes are going in the wrong direction. managing edits within the sng file could be helpful… and help keep files more organized?
sorry if i’ve gone off topic 
Hi idover:
I idea of useing different drives should have no issues with importing files to the time-line… I haven’t tried this yet, but I’m gonna get into this in a big way and try it out… I don’t care what the tracks are and for what project they were tracked for… I’d just like to see if any issues surface in the importing of tracks from different drives… Right now, on this P-111 that I am installing XP Home on, I have 6 Hard drives with 2 DVD burners… Four of the drives at connected to a Promise-T card. The two Burners are connected to the secondary IDE Port… The two Drives are connected to the primary IDE port… The Primary Boot drive… I’d like to install Two Boot partitions… One with XP and the other partition with '98SE… I realize, that, I’m gonna have to format/convert some of the drives to Fat-32 and the rest of the drives to NTFS file structures… The Boot Drive will have a FAT 32 partition for '98SE and the other partition will have NTFS structure for XP Home… I’m working on this idea as the thread continues… But I don’t as yet have the FAT 32 partition formated for '98SE as yet… I’m haveing trouble getting Partition Magic to recognize the E Drive… I don’t understand this at-the-moment… All the other drives show up on the PM Table…
By the way… the E Drive is recognized by the XP Desk…and… so are all the other drives… Partition Magic doesn’t see it…
Anyone know the answer to this??
However, I’m gonna Copy-and-Paste a bunch of .wav files to different NTFS drives and fill up the time line with a bunch of tracks from different drives and push the “PLAY” Button…
Does anyone have any preminitions as to what might happen 
As I see it… There’s no Going-of-Topic… here… Cause all this is part-and-parcel of the archiving, of .wav files on your DAW… Mabey if we can refine all thses ideas, and then present a tough-to-refuse “Change” to n-Track’s File System, Mabey, we’ll get Flavio to MOVE on this and we’ll have a NEW version…
Bill…
| Quote (learjeff @ July 19 2005,14:08) |
| What should the "rename track renames file" feature do when there are multiple parts in the track from different wave files with little in common in the file names? Or should this feature work only when only one file is used in the track. What if the same file in that track is used in parts in other tracks? Should the rename still take place, or should it take place if and only if there is only one file in the track, and that file does not appear in other tracks? BTW, there is a polarity switch, in the EQ section. For a track with only mono WAVE files, you have to check "expand mono track to stereo" in order to control left and right side polarity independently. (You have to do this in order to get stereo effects on the track as well, in case you didn't know.) |
What should the "rename track renames file" feature do when there are multiple parts in the track from different wave files with little in common in the file names? Or should this feature work only when only one file is used in the track.
What if the same file in that track is used in parts in other tracks? Should the rename still take place, or should it take place if and only if there is only one file in the track, and that file does not appear in other tracks?
Let's keep it simple - rename it only if it is the only file in the track, and the file is used only once in the sng.
Ehancements could come later.
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| Let’s keep it simple - rename it only if it is the only file in the track, and the file is used only once in the sng. Ehancements could come later. |
Agreed. A simple change which gives 90% of the functionality for 10% of the effort…
But since I name all my tracks when I record them, I’d much rather have the “Hide tracks in a group from the mixer” enhancement…
http://www.ntrack.com/cgi-bin…;t=3048
Mark
On similar lines, when in track view, every part of every track shows the filename with the .wav extansion. It would be handy to be able to switch this off as it can add clutter to the screen, especially when there are many small parts lined up next to each other. I’d like to be able to keep filenames very short, like “Kb”, “gtr2”, etc, so would welcome being able to remove the .wav extension.
I have set Windows to remove extensions for known file-types in Explorer, but n-Track is unaffacted by this. Perhaps someone knows a Windows/n-Track workaround anyway?
JW
Here’s another vote for JW’s suggestion that we be able to turn off the display of file names on the tracks themselves.
As for renaming the tracks/wavs, I have never seen a need for that. If I need the same wav file for another song I actually copy the file to the new songs folder to keep everything neat anyway, and have n set to ask me the name of the wav file when I record it.
It has never crossed my mind that it might be useful to be able to rename the track and wav at the same time.
But then, my wife has always said that I am somewhat … erm … unique. Yeah, unique, that’s it!
Hi DaveC. I meant removing the extension, i.e. displaying “bass” instead of “bass.wav”.
Anyway, I have suceeded in virtually removing the filename from the display: change the colour to something dark, dark grey etc, or at least a colour that matches the background. Then select a very tiny font, of size 1, say. You’ll find the filename has shrunk to virtually nothing, or you won’t be able to see it at all. Not sure how much this is a help, but if you want to remove the filenames, it is possible.
OK, I’ll jump on the band wagon here for opening up the song file format. This would also give us access to the MIDI data, lots of utilities that could be dreamed up in this area. I can’t imagine publishing the format would give any advantage to competitors, but the community involvement in these utilities could make a new selling point for N-Track.
On a barely related topic, there’s even an open source beer - http://www.voresoel.dk/main.php?id=70
i’m not really interested in having n-track open source… i’d be happy with a wrapper/type library for the song files that simply exposed properties and methods… such as an enumeration of the tracks as some “track” class, with properties for type of track like bit depth, sampling rate, file path, effects, etc…
such an interface would allow us developers to write apps to do things that may not be available in the current version of ntrack… one thing i’d love to write is a “library console” that helped to manage .sng files… at the moment, i depend on my creative use of the windows file system to manage projects…
isaac