On Tue, Apr 08, 2014 at 12:55:56AM +0300, Paul Davis wrote: > This doesn't fit with what I've seen in live mixing situations. I > understand the importance of the ergonomics, but I would suggest that if > you were using the best designed mixer and it was altered in one small way, > my question above would remain rhetorically on target. > modification would be to (a) remove all value indicators from the mixer > (b) replace all the knobs with "endless v-pots". It would no longer be 'the best designed mixer'. You need to see values when setting things up. With a bit of experience you know e.g. what sort of EQ will be needed for a particular channel, and being able to prepare such things or set them very quickly without too much trial and error makes all the difference. If you need half the sound- check or rehearsal time to do that there's a problem. Once the show is running you typically only make small changes. What is important then is being able to find all controls quicly without having to search for them, and preferably without having to take your eyes from the stage for longer than a split second. Which is where the ergonomics come in. Of course it's reassuring to be able to see all settings. But you don't need to see all of them all the time, what matters is how and how quickly you get acces to them. > In addition, live sound and the editing+mixing workflow are two different > things, related by a common set of concepts and tools. This is easily > demonstrated by the existence of consoles built specifically for live > sound. Certainly one could make a studio console work, but the workflow is > sufficiently differentiated that people have pressed for changes to make > things easier. That is very clear today, when a DAW is used not just to record and mix (by a sound engineer) but to actually 'compose' a piece (by a musician), and the whole workflow is essentially based on random acess on the time axis. In the 'tape' days there was much less difference between 'live' and 'studio' work. The mixers we used (Neve, Harrison, SSL) where all 'studio' ones, and they were perfectly suited to this kind of work. Consoles like Digico are different because they are build for PA which has its own requirements. But I wouldn't want to use those to mix a live broadcast. > ... > To be honest, I think that if I were a blind user and needed to edit, I > would probably be looking at tools that used the same kind of workflow as > RTCmix or something similar. A fully text-based representation of the > operations/mix that can be easily manipulated without any visual > presentation. RTCmix has the downside that (if I recall correctly) it can > only play back the entire mix, but I would have thought that this sort of > thing would be a better starting point for a "music editor for blind users" > than Ardour. It will all depend on the type of editing that is required. Blind users could easily edit tape, and also use the early generation of hard disk recorders before these developed into full-featured DAWs. These couldn't do the sort of thing a DAW can do today, but for some types of work they were actually better. Ciaom, -- FA A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow) _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
