Questions & Answers

Would it be possible to have toggle on/off for some of the new "features" that might break some user's workflow?

+1 vote
asked Jul 22 in Look and Feel by gianclaudiofracchiolla1 (160 points)

I'll explain a bit thoroughly what I mean.
In recent updates, there have been some changes to some of the things I have been using the most, and all in all it's nice to give users the ability to change how the program works to make it more "our own". But some features can break some people's workflow, which is a shame in such a workflow beast such as S1.

Around 4.5 there has been a change to how the quantization panels worked.
Music editor (piano roll), Audio editor and Arrangement quantization panels' settings have to be adjusted individually every time you change settings in one of them. They used to be syncronized, but now you just have to repeat the same task three times and it's not very workflow friendly. I get that some people could use three different swing/quantization/groove settings across the same project (even if I can hardly imagine why someone would do that) and if on top of that we add the issue of non displayed decimals we need to round the number first and then copy it in the other two sections for every single parameter we tweak.
If this was a new feature, it would be nice to have the option to toggle on/off the syncronization of these panels.

Another minor annoyance is that there are now lines between each peak meter in the narrow tall mixer view. I don't think they serve any meaningful purpose but again, not everyone is the same.
Still, they are quite distracting, especially with the light theme because they only make the interface busier and generally when it comes to UI needlessly busier interfaces are never a good idea. Some people might enjoy these, so again an option to toggle these separators on and off would be great.

In general, giving users the ability to customize the daw to their likings is not a bad idea and I hope PreSonus seriously considers this. Studio One 3 made a giant leap forward (especially UX-UI wise) and it felt great in terms of usability (non-eyesore clip colours, consistent interface elements, readability of the browser due to different folder backgrounds, and several other reasons) and as long as some changes are just visual I can just live with them, but when you do professional work every day for 8 hours at least and the software you use for most of the time changes the way you work it makes me wonder if I should have sticked with the older version of the software which, sadly, becomes abandonware and doesn't get any fix for all bugs that have been missed prior to the new version (as an example for Studio One 3, most noticeably soft crashes when using stretch markers, bugged quantization).

But I digress, in short what I would love to see is the ability to not compromise our workflow if we upgrade to newer versions of the program.

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