Ian, with all due respect, the point of the 'fancy' stuff is that one doesn't have to go to different windows with unnecessary mouse clicks to shrink windows, open other windows, etc. No amount of opening and closing windows actually gets one to making music faster. It's wasted motions and movements. Digging through a virtual 'pile' of windows to get to the right one also is wasted movement, time, etc.

If you take a look at the image link I posted you'll see a single screen that gives access to all 'fundamental' items used to record and mix music. Fully collapsible as the OP suggests.

Once you use something like this, the thought of having independent windows for different tasks is akin to recalling a bad smell.

I'm completely serious about this. There's no need to have a mixer 'window' that you have to go launch and use independently.

A context sensitive GUI is VERY handy to getting music made. It messes with your brain in a very good way. The only downside, is that once you have made the connections in your brain that when you click on something that has minimal visual detail and see the details of that element ON THE SAME SCREEN, without having to navigate somewhere else, you begin to think that all software should work this way. It doesn't really even require a large monitor.

A track is a track. What is contained in a track? What the input happens to be; midi or audio. The notes or waveforms already recorded. The sound source (if it's midi) and effects. The levels that the track is playing. The routing of that track to various bus and other outputs.

If you have an efficient graphical way of showing all of those elements - at least in some visual context, then you see an entire landscape of that track all at once. If you want to see detail for any one of those elements listed, you click on it and there it is in the SAME window, at the bottom of the screen, without navigating away from the landscape.

Two DAW programs work with this general visual context, one more so than the other. Mackie's Tracktion (which is for all intents and purposes now considered abandonware) and Apple's Logic (though it does less on a screen than Tracktion).

I would LOVE to see PG take a clean sheet look at their GUI philosophy and at least consider this type of a GUI as an approach. It is very time and effort efficient.

-Scott

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