Questions & Answers

Studio One settings in one place

+2 votes
1,048 views
asked Apr 4 in Look and Feel by fredriklidin (1,490 points)

I would like to suggest a more unified way to organize the settings in Studio One. Although Studio One is clearer and better than some other DAW's regarding where to find a particular setting, things could improve.

The way things work now, you can access the settings via 'preferences' (MAC) or 'options' (WIN) – BTW, what is the point of naming the same thing differently for each platform? This is however a great place to start. The layout is pretty clear, but the names for the sections is not clear. I like the big icons for each tab, i.e. 'General', 'Locations'. To me it is unclear why the setting for editing is under 'Advanced' and not under 'General', or indeed in a tab of it's own. Why is editing more "advanced" than 'Touch input' for example? There's no logic to this, I think.

There are more unclear locations for various settings. For example, why is the setting for 'Enable Autosave' under 'Locations'? If you were guessing your way to that setting, I don't think you would guess it was located there. Another example: we have settings for the 'Console' (mixer) under 'Advanced'. That is all fine, but we also have settings for the console in the mixer window, which can be confusing. It wouldn't be confusing if the tweakable settings were identical in both places. But... both in the preferences window and the local mixer-window settings we have, for example, a setting for 'colorize channel strips', but other settings can be different. Why not gather all settings concerning the mixer (console) in one place, and make it possible to access those settings from various logical places?

A final example: You want to 'Keep bus channels to the right' and have 'Audio track monitoring follows record'. In that scenario you have to tweak settings in two different places – the 'Preferences' and the local settings window in the mixer (the wrench icon). Where each setting is located follows no apparent logic, I think.

I would suggest to gather all the settings in one place (Preferences), and name them in a clear and descriptive way:

Editing | Console | Appearance | Locations | Devices | Plug-ins | Audio | MIDI | Video | Services (or something similar...). Under such tabs there could be sub-categories like 'synchronization', 'keyboard shortcuts', and any other relevant parameter.

The wrench tool in the arrangement, and mixer window could take you directly to the relevant place in the preference window.

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