I started using Studio One a few years ago. I've been a DAW user for decades, and I can honestly say that I've never fallen in love with one as fast as I did with Studio One - and it's certainly taken my productivity to the next level.
There are, however, some serious drawbacks in the ORGANIZING department that become glaringly obvious when you are using Studio One a lot, and I am frustrated to see that there have been little progress regarding these issues in the past decade, even though many users have addressed them over the years.
So I realize that a lot of these requests have been made before, and I'm sorry if it creates clutter in your question database and you feel you have to edit/hide/delete my post.
But they all pertain to the same sort of territory that I find sorely lacking in Studio One, and I think it's worth a go to be a bit of a nuisance and post/compile this as a separate list of requests - come what may! Hopefully someone will look at it with a fresh pair of eyes :)
All of these are major drawbacks when you are working on large projects, and if you have a lot of instruments and presets in your database. At least with my workflow, it is - suggestions for improvements in my thinking are highly encouraged!
1. The ability to drag and drop presets from Windows folders...
2. ... or at least have the option to detach the Browse window, and then possibly expand the file view to column view for a quick overview in large folders.
3. "Expand all folders" in Track List and Main Track Window in the event that no instruments are yet attached to the tracks, or at least an "Instrument Tracks" icon in Track List that works regardless of folder status.
(I often keep empty tracks in my templates as placeholders due to the issue mentioned in #5, and they can be unnecessarily hard to locate when I can't magically unhide them in the Console Channel List, which appears to be the only place you can unhide all other instrument and audio tracks once all folders are collapsed.)
4. Toggle Instrument Sort by Name/Position in Console View - and possibly autofocus the active instrument in Main Track View to Console and Performance Monitor as well for convenience.
5. Choose whether you want to load instruments or not when opening a song. It would be very useful for large templates - which is an almost impossible enterprise at the moment.
I'm not sure how it works now, but "Disable Track" still seem to load up the instruments and the attached effects before disabling them (?) at startup, which can be a major hassle for a template containing hundreds of instruments. And even when disabled, they are still somehow loaded into memory, it would appear, stealing a bit of CPU...?
I would love to see a solution where a disabled track was merely a (more) non-intrusive placeholder allowing for, in principle, an unlimited amount of tracks and effects, all ready to go, in the layout of the template instead of i.e. keeping intricate Instrument+FX template folders for each song project, which is what I'm doing at the moment. I'm sorry if my point here is a bit muddled - as I said, I don't understand fully how it all works.
6. Also, the header tabs in Instrument View lose their dropdown functionality once you exceed 100+ instruments, which makes it fairly unhandy to find and delete instruments only, when you want to keep the instrument track and event data. (The Performance Monitor seems to be the most practical choice once this occurs - but it's frustrating to have to spend 30 extra seconds looking up the instrument there every time it happens.)
Thanks for listening. Despite these issues, it's always exciting to see how you are constantly improving and updating your brilliant software.
And apologies in advance if, in my arrogance, I have overlooked existing functionality that can help me solve these issues. If you know anything I don't, please do tell!