It’s election time 
Ok, the ‘best feature’ vote is here! 
It is based on the forum people’s wishes and ideas (see the suggestion thread), and it is completely unofficial, meaning there are no guarantees that any of these features will ever be implemented.
So as you see, the list of features has gotten much smaller. The reason for this is that I’ve decided to split the features (very) roughly into two categories:
small/takes less time to program
medium, large/takes more time to program
So it’s about the larger ones on this one. There will be a second vote about the second most wanted feature so keep your pants on meanwhile. 
Well, you know because the guys had talk about it, but i vote by ex, the score, but anyway i want the other features! Or maybe Flavio can make n-Track a la carte? 
I went for the freezing, since my CPU would really appreciate it if I want to be able to do reasonable mixes without doing my current:
Repeat
approximate settings
Render to Wav
Check mix
Until (Mix is OK)
Which thankfully I can now do in about 5 iterations, I guess I just like memory hungry VST/VSTi!
My scond choice would be Grouping of Tracks, followed by side chain bussing.
I know there’s been a lot of talk about scoring, but it doesn’t affect me at the mo. However, I realise that it would be a good marketing component - I guess it could be done by adjust the output from the piano roll - re-render the graphics as traditional dots, rather than rectangles. hmmm… I wouldn’t want to do it!
DSP
Oh this is a tough one. I’ll have to think about it a while.
Scoring would be great - I don’t know what development tools Flav uses to write n-Track but I’d be willing to bet there is a module he could license to add scoring with minimal code implementation. 
Freeze - also a good idea but I have yet to bog down my Athlon with too many FX or VSTi’s. It would be a boon for people running older systems though.
Track grouping - I like that idea as well. Sometimes it’s hard to grab multiple tracks and drag 'em around.
Scrub - I almost feel like voting for this one by default as I’ve been shouting from the rooftops for a while asking for scrub. It may not be THE most important thing though…
Mix pitch change - I dunno about this one. That’s what Cooledit and the like excels at. It would be nice if it was integrated into n-Track but I see mucho headaches that could arise.
Sub Tracks -
Sidechain Bussing - This is also a great idea. Probably my second choice.
First choice? Hmmm…let me think before I punch a chad. Don’t want to leave one hanging!
TG
What i would love to see is a bounce feature like cakewalk has, here you can mixdown, but it does not record the midi softsynth track, and always tells me that i have midi tracks that can not be mixed. On cakewalk, you can do a bounce to tracks, and the whole mix including the midi will mix down if the midi is ran thru a softsynth.
I can do the same with N, but must do it by looping the output back into a channel of the mixer and getting the levels right after a try or two, but being able to do tht in faster than real time would be nice. this is great is you want to convert the tracks to audio and work on them. it take forever on N as it is now.
Disclaimer, there is probabiy a way but i suck and do not know it!!
You forgot the most important feature needed - a talent button…
and maybe a checkbox in the mixdown dialog called “for marketing ready” (but you need avoid to push the talent button first…)
A read-only score would be fairly easy.
But then folks would want to be able to edit MIDI in score mode. This is terribly nontrivial, even if there was lots of free and high quality software available for the job, because it’s interactive with n-Track (and the user). Interactions like this are probably the single biggest complexity in software. Implementing a GUI-based editor is not a walk in the park!
A fairly simple “freeze” capability would be as easy to implement as some of the harder “simple” suggestions in the other voting thread. By “simple freeze”, I mean
(1) select the tracks to freeze
(2) hit the FREEZE button
(3) wait for offline mixdown to complete.
(4) the selected tracks get hidden or minimized somehow, and replaced by a new track that represents the frozen set.
(5) Decide to make changes, right-click “THAW” on the frozen track
(7) back to step 1, after making changes.
This would save a little manual work each time. But it wouldn’t save a whole lot of time – the amount of time it takes to mute and minimize the “frozen” tracks, frankly.
Robo, if Cakewalk can do this, so can N. That is, N can do it with any hardware that doesn’t require external loopback. So what I really mean is, if N can’t do it, then neither can Cakewalk – with the hardware in question.
With N, if it’s a VSTi/DXi plugin you just do an offline mixdown and import the track.
If it’s a soundcard that provides the output in digital format, you go to View -> Soundcard’s Mixer -> Recording Controls and select your MIDI device to record, and then do a Mixdown. If the soundcard doesn’t provide its MIDI synth to the computer in digital format, then the external loopback is your only option.
HTH
Jeff, thanks for the response, I think i get what you are saying. Yes With my setup I can do a mixdown with NT and it will record the tracks thru the softsynth, but it sends it to a file on the hard drive rather than to a new track, i wish it had that option as well. I love the feature on cakewalk, that allows you to bounce a track or several tracks to a new track right there on the screen under the existing ones.
What i have been doing is to loop back to an open channel on my mixer, but if i want to make separate track for each midi i have to do that in real time. so a song that is say 4 minutes long would take half an hour to complete that function with CW it can be done in less than 5 minutes, and even though NT will do it i wish it would give the option to mix to the current project rather than to a folder that make you have to go and retreive each track and that take even more time.
So my point is I would love that feature, but i do realize that i might be missing something here and there is a way, there is a lot about N that i do not know, but cakewalk i have used since home studio version 3.0 on floppy disk. it is an easy program, i just wish it had better VSTi capabilities and the better versions were not so darned expensive. I really do prefer NT overall, but that is a great feature.
Aha – here’s how to solve your problem with the folders. I suppose N should be fixed to do this by default.
Instead of double-clicking on a song icon to start N, just start N from the desktop or whatever. Then use “open project”, navigate to the song file, and open the song file. Then, whenever you go to open a track, the file browser will be right there in the same folder.
Here’s another tip that really helps keep things organized. When starting a new song, click “Save as”. Create a new folder with the song’s full name and open that. Then save the song, using an abbreviated name (so all the track file names don’t get so long). Now, all your wave files will be in the same folder as the song file, and separate from other songs. Whenever you start N, whatever folder you last worked in will be the default when you open or save songs or wave files. So, starting N is actually faster this way than navigating to your song folder and double-clicking on the song file. Also, you can always try the “open last song file on sartup” option and see if you like it.
When working this way, mixdown & import is a lot faster, because the new file is right there every time. (Unless you’ve just loaded a soundfont in sfz or something like that, but that’s for another thread!)
Thanks that helps alot, i will setup and do that this evening, even take the old songs and make new folders for them
OK. I decided to vote for scoring. Just because it would be very handy for a few little tasks I do. (And I can’t “technically” sight read music) I think I mentioned this before…but sometimes what we do for our church music is record MIDI from a keyboard of what notes we want in what place for the horn players. Click transcribe for whatever key the horn is in and bang! Print 'em and pass 'em out. Even a musically illiterate hack like me can grind out horn charts this way. I have to do it in Cubase VST which came with my soundcard. It would be a great feature for n-Track.
TG
Hi Everyone:
I know and, it’s been said… It would be nice to have multible choice voting… But however, that’s not available…
Group/Mixer improvments are at the top of a list I would support.
Then, in the Settings>Path> The ability to have multible choices in the External Wave Editor Path… Or… The ability to choose more than one editor, to edit tracks, while on-line, with n-Track…
Then, the ability to Freeze Tracks, so as, to lessen the Processor load… While doing a Mix Session… An Audio Scrub feature would be equally important, to me and my setup…
Bill…
My £0.02…
PCs are getting faster. A few years ago I would have loved to have had a Freeze facility to use on my PII 450, but now even my humble 1Ghz PIII will do 20 tracks with effects. If I want Freeze I can do it manually with mixdown - albeit not the easiest of things to do.
PCs will keep getting faster so it’s my belief that Freeze will become obselete (How many tracks do we really need?).
So I’d rather Flavio spend time adding features that will last longer than the technology and can’t be done any other way.
Mark
| Quote (Mark A @ Dec. 06 2004,03:15) |
| My £0.02..... PCs are getting faster. A few years ago I would have loved to have had a Freeze facility to use on my PII 450, but now even my humble 1Ghz PIII will do 20 tracks with effects. If I want Freeze I can do it manually with mixdown - albeit not the easiest of things to do. PCs will keep getting faster so it's my belief that Freeze will become obselete (How many tracks do we really need?). So I'd rather Flavio spend time adding features that will last longer than the technology and can't be done any other way. Mark |
You're talking about effects, how about softsynths then? And the recording method where you record clean through a effect for the guitarist, singer etc? Takes lots of cpu, and freezing would help a lot here. Even with my athlon 3400+ I get crackles and pops pretty soon when softsynths step into the picture (using 24-bit version). The latency issues soon follow also. Freeze would make all this simpler.
yeah, i run a 2.8ghz, 1gb ram and still have create a seperate project to mix the 6 tracks of drums i have. that, plus the rest of the musical tracks can get to be too much fast… again, depending on what kind of fx you’re using (how processor intensive they are)… throw in some vsti’s or rewire junk and forget it. i’d love to be able to mix the drum kit in the same project, then “freeze” it for awhile when i go to work on or record the other instruments. computers are getting faster yes, but wait till our demands for more bit depth, etc, increase! it IS getting better, but for people like me, computers will never be fast enough!!! 
Hey guys, vote, is free!!!
(Or you think that you must pay for this new features…?)
only 37 votes ins a 600 registered members forum… maybe all we are using too much pseudinims (Toker has made school?
Yep. We are all just figments of Tokes imagination.
I see freeze is out in front by a little margin. Sa’ good feature to have I suppose…
TG
hey mates if you lot want gobs of midi stuff n scoring im usin powertracks fer it. blinkin nice prog blinkin low pesos too.