The menu structure has been nagging me from day one and the more I use it (being a sit back and mouse kinda guy) the more illogical it seems. Nothing to do with functionality, but ergonomics and transferrence of thought patterns from other applications, not even daws.
Example: How do you call the transport menu when the transport is hidden? Those items scatter all over the place and some are nowhere else, and some shouldn't even be there. Say I put the big clock up in the corner and hide the transport during mixing for a tad more screen space. Some of the items from that menu scatter to various other menu headers.
There is no top-level Transport menu to bring those items together on the main window nor a main Media menu to bring all media related functions together in one single place with minimal nesting.
Some nested transport menu items are just plain illogical - Play, Record, Pause, Stop. Why would anyone right-click the transport and then click a link to another nested menu and then click that menu item to play or stop etc when they can just click the button on the transport bar they right-clicked on in the first place?
Some things that should be there are in another top-level application menu with no easily apparent (to me) relevance to their placement on another menu. On the left is a tightly grouped Transport menu with nothing else. On the right is a mixture of things that appear in various other places in the top level menus. I know where they are here but after using them there... often finding them in there scattered positions is more difficult.
Adding that menu *also* to a top-level window menu would be better I think as it would allow grouping them logically.
There's 2 transport functions in the View menu "Go to Cursor & Play Cursor" that don't exist in the transport menu.
You can navigate to markers from there but you can't create new ones, which is a transport function, managing markers. To create markers with the menu you go to a different place, the Insert menu... where you insert files, but not in the file menu.
The right-click media menu also feels scattered to me with things dealing with takes being in different places. Apply FX to Take (3 items which are take editing functions) are seperated from some other take editing functions in a nested menu that has take navigation functions (next / previous) grouped with take editing functions (delete, crop, duplicate) ... while there are other take editing functions dealing with applying individual take FX in higher level root menu popup media menu. At the least all those should be grouped logically in one single menu level.
And none of it's on (I don't think) the top level window menu. If everything dealing with Takes was *also* under one top-level menu and grouped logically by function, it would much easier to remember where they are at any given time when you have 45 other things going through your brain during a session.
Shouldn't there also be a "Takes" menu up top with all of that stuff grouped logically under one header?
It's a little confusing and hard to keep track of where things are for me in practice as it doesn't seem to follow any logical pattern.
There's lots of things like that in the menu structure which I find hard to grasp. "Insert Media" should be expanded (and maybe on the File menu since any media you insert is a file) but isn't. When I go to insert *any* media I already know what type I'm going to get, audio, midi or video. The lack of menu seperation of those media types means I have to filter them in the dialog when I go to insert.
So even if it stays on the INSERT menu give me 3 menu items so when I go looking for audio, I only see audio in the dialog. That menu is pretty short and can easily handle two items to seperate those classes. There's also plenty of top-level menu bar space for some of the stuff that's buried down in two levels of nested menus and then a popup dialog.
The only thing that would change is that new users would much more easily be able to navigate those menus.
Final Example: (possible 200th macro aside)
1. Right click media item.
2. Select Item Properties
3. Click "choose new file" button.
4. Open a window that shows every type of media file type Reaper can import as if you'd swap a video file with a midi file?
5. Change the filter to match the type of file you want and hide the rest.
6. Find and change the file.
Or maybe someday just go to the File menu and click "Choose New File" and have the default dialog filter match the selected file type? Should not anything dealing with files be there in the File menu? That would be the first place anyone would look.
End of nitpick... any errors above apologized for in advance. It's... unusual. I spend lots of time pausing looking around the menus trying to find something that should be logically close to something similar.
Please: Transport menu, Media menu, and Takes menu at the top level of the application window with everything relevant beneath them. Thanks.