Maybe we need to flesh out this idea some. I think the devs prefer to see a well thought-out presentation of an idea like with mockups and stuff. There’s quite a lot to think about here, and somebody’s got to come up with some sort of plan. I’m not exactly sure I’m up to it right now, but if we put our heads together...
First off exactly what all needs to change for this to work and actually be useful? Off the top of my head, there’s a couple things, but most of it is in and around the I/O panel.
1. Add a button nest to “Track Channels” labeled something like “Channel Names” which opens a new moral window which looks and works pretty much like the one we have for aliasing hardware I/O, but applies only to the channels on this one track.
a) Ideally we could add and subtract channel pairs here too so we don’t have to go back and forth to the Track Channels dropdown. In fact, maybe it’s not so much like the I/O aliasing, but just a numbered list of names and you can move the names up and down or add and delete them right there. Fine if you still force the total channel count to pairs. (We’ll have that fight another day
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That will be where the real magic happens. The rest is just display, I think, but where all does that need to happen.
2. We’re still in the I/O panel, so let’s start at the top:
a) Parent Channels will display whatever names the parent has given to it’s channels.
b) Send, Audio Hardware Outputs, and Receives are all pretty much the same. The boxes where were choose source and destination channels will display the names that the respective track has defined. We’d want to see the numbers, too for sure.
I) It would be super cool if the “Add new...” drop downs actually did a tree thing so we could pick the specific channel(s) right there. So like you hover over the track and basically see the same as in those Source/Destination things. This would be cool even without channel names!
3. Now the MCP. ATM, sends don’t tell us anything about the channels. That sucks and I’d be ecstatic if It could be fixed with or without the addition of names, but in the context of this FR, I’d like for the send to read like “1.1/2: Channel Name on Track Name”. Now I know there’s not much space there, but it should “tool tip” when we hover over it, no?
4. Plugin pin connectors. I’m not sure how much more needs to be said. Display channel names there. Would be really nice if we could do naming right there. Like just click and type. I understand that is maybe beyond the scope of this window, and can definitely live with display-only here.
Running out of time for right now, but one other thought I had was like if we explode a multichannel item from a track with named channels, maybe the new tracks could (optionally?) inherit those names.
What do you think of that? What else needs to change? Where else would we even see these things? Wanna make some pictures of what I’ve described? Let’s whip this together cause it really would make so many things so much better.