Quote:

You complain about the undo, etc...that's ridicolous, I remember when it wasn't even there.



Honestly, I don't see your point, but well, I knew that this thread wasn't going to make me "popular" here Now, I'd like to clarify a couple of things:

1. Redesigning the interface has nothing to do with painting the whole interface with fancy colours to attract kids, but with making things easier and more logical for the serious end user.

2. I don't think that BIAB is mainly an older persons software, I think it can attract (I'd say it SHOULD attract) any serious musician, because it is the perfect tool for studying any instrument.

3. There are many uses of the program. I, as a working musician, have used it always as the perfect tool for practising my instrument, in this area I have everything a need (three or four sets of jazz realtracls) since years. But since the arrive of Realtracks, I also use the program as the perfect tool to make backing tracks for my wife, a professional singer, and in this area I find that the program really shines on the Jazz, Pop and Country areas, where are a lot of very good sounding realtracks, but lacks a little bit of versatility (realtracs-wise) in other genres. Just MHO

Havig said that, let me tell you another story After many years as a Cubase user, I've just changed to another DAW (I prefer not name it in order avid too much "spam") in the last month. I was VERY used to Cubase's GUI, and a couple of times I tried with another DAWs (Logic, Sonar) just for curiosity, but my conclusion was always the same:

"With Logic, I can do more or less the same things that Cubase, but in a different way. The effort of learning Logic it's not worth."

My experience was different with the new DAW. Its basic interface is much simpler, and at first everything seems too strange, because it seems to be no tools in the screen!. But after 10 minutes, you start to see the logic behind that; after 20 minutes you discover that everything is there, but it's hidden until you need it; and after just one hour you are wondering why nobody has invented this thing before. Some examples:

1. In Cubase there are a lot of track Types (MIDI, Audio, Track, Folder, Group, Marker, Play order, Video...); Here, just one. You want it to be MIDI? Just record some midi notes on it. You want it to carry video? Just drag&drop some video track over it...

2. You can show and hide every element of the UI within a single menu, and arrange the ones you use most on TABS, so you can organize and arrange the screen easily at your own way, and everything what YOU need is at your disposal.

3. By default there are no editing tools (but you can work with them if you want to) Instead, you use right button context menu and keyboard shortcuts to perform all edits. You don't like default keyboard shortcuts? You can define them at your own way.

4. By default there are just very few (and small) icons on the screen: they occupy valuable space on the screen; most of the time you just don't need them; you can get the same results with right button, keys shortcuts, or menus; they are redundant.

5. There is no help file, because you don't need it. Instead you have a very powerful command finder. You don't remember how to, say, normalize a track? Just write "normalize track", then press "run", and you're done. Do you use this command very often? Just assign it a custom keyboard shortcut to it.

6. And (last but not least) all elements of the GUI are by default painted with nice different gradiations of the same colour, which doesn't distract attention out of the important elements (tracks and other elements that carry musical information) and helps to not getting tired after hours in front of the computer.


You get it. Everything there is customizable, even the menus (you can hide the commands you are not going to use, add your own ones or put the ones you use most on the top of the list), and that means that if you want to organize your workspace at your own way you can do it, if not, just leave it as is. I know that a DAW and BIAB are very different animals, but I think that some of these ideas could be applied to BIAB, for example:

1. Instead of having MIDI Styles, RT Styles, Realtracks, Realdrums and Midi Instruments (wich is kind of confusing for new users), it would be nicer working just with Instruments (MIDI, Realtacks, and Realdrums) and Styles (Collections of Instruments)

2. It would be nice having a single "View" menu, from where you can easily hide and show any of the elements of the GUI (btw, I was just trying to hide the main piano section over the icons and didn't find the way to do it) And it would be nice that if you hide some elements (for example, the icons), the rest of them would resize properly.

And so on...

Just my two cents.

Last edited by Cerio; 12/06/11 09:13 AM.