Re: [Audacity-devel] New effects menus

[Anthony A. O. <Ant...@ep...>]

On Wed, 07 Aug 2002 23:28:22 -0700, Dominic Mazzoni wrote:

>Joshua Haberman wrote:
>> I wonder if "Insert" should be renamed to "Generate" to reduce
>> ambiguity.  "Insert" is often used to mean "insert a real-time effect
>> into the signal flow," and if we were to add real-time effects later it
>> could be confusing.
>
>Generate would be fine.  Anyone else have any thoughts?  I'd like
>to hear from others who have more experience with high-end audio
>editors.

I use two higherend apps mainly. Protools and Soundforge.

Protools has a plugin type called Audiosuite, which are non-realtime and
encompass all sorts of stuff, including plugs that generate new sound. Protools
5.1 is a very bad example in terms of plugin organization. The Audiosuite
plugins are all stuffed in to one large menu, that isn't even alphabetically
sorted. Crap.

Soundforge only has one actual generator, which it keeps in the Tools menu under
Synthesis. For Audacity the current idea is much better and more intuitive.

An inexperienced user might need a longer description than 'Generator'. 
Synthesis sound like an instrument, so perhaps 'Generate Sound' or 'Sound
Generators' should be its own menu or be a submenu in 'Plugins'.

A brilliant timesaving feature in Soundforge is the means to organize your
plugin menu structure with a small 'explorer'-like control. It has a little
helper function too that offers to create folders for plugins starting with the
same word, such as MDA Compressor and MDA Vocoder, which would get thrown in to
an "MDA" folder in the effects menu of the plugins.

Since we're classifying plugins anyway, I think this tool would make a most
useful addition to the Audacity interface.

How about a test compile with these menus ? I'd volunteer at least three people
here to usertest this menu feature here. Feedback.

How long has it been since the last test-release to the list ?

 Tony