Superior Drummer Tracker feature requests

[Jacek]

The Superior Drummer 3 Tracker is a fantastic tool but could use a few improvements to make editing more efficient. These all apply to standalone mode, as that’s my main workflow at the moment.

1. Additional options in ‘select’ menu: ‘Select by velocity…’. A new box has options that will let you select all notes below a value, over a value. This will be very useful for creating a map only for snare ghost notes. It’s not precise enough to select by dragging the selection when zoomed out to see the whole track.
2. Playhead follows playback toggle. Just like the Pro Tools ‘n’ shortcut’. IWhen listening to my edits, I would catch a mistrigger and instinctively hit space bar to stop playback and take care of it. Unfortunately, this takes me back to where the playhead was originally at, so I have no idea where that missing note is if I wasn’t keeping my eye on the bar timeline
3. Turn off auto scrolling in the trigger editor
4. Zoom tool. Select a specific area and zoom into it. Much less tedious than having to drag the zoom brackets at the bottom
5. Lower priority, but a pre-roll value would be nice in the standalone version. Helpful when you are focusing on edits and want to hear some context without having to scroll around
6. The select similar knob could use a toggle to only select new notes after the playhead location. If I am editing notes and everything has been fine but then I come across a note that is not getting triggered, I want to select it, select similar and know that whatever work I have done up to this point not get affected. Otherwise, this adds another step to my work to verify I did not trigger anything I shouldn’t have.
7. It looks like it’s not a general issue but UI performance is making it difficult to work on my 2013 Mac Pro. Already created ticket 89300 but haven’t heard back yet.

• This topic was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by Jacek.

Topic

[Douglas hill]

I would like to second the playback head stop/reset “feature”.   the space bar should start and stop the playback without resetting it to the beginning.  The Alt+Space should reset…..just my two cents worth.

[Henrik]

Jacek wrote:

The select similar knob could use a toggle to only select new notes after the playhead location. If I am editing notes and everything has been fine but then I come across a note that is not getting triggered, I want to select it, select similar and know that whatever work I have done up to this point not get affected. Otherwise, this adds another step to my work to verify I did not trigger anything I shouldn’t have.

If you use the Split Region Tool in the Tracker, you can select the region(s) you want to work with, and Select Similar will only select notes in the selected region(s).

I have written down the other requested features, that wasn’t on our list before! Thanks.

Henrik Ekblom - User Experience Designer
Toontrack

[Henrik]

Jacek wrote:

Additional options in ‘select’ menu: ‘Select by velocity…’. A new box has options that will let you select all notes below a value, over a value.

We didn’t focus on creating a more advanced select menu since it’s usually pretty easy to lasso (click and drag) select the velocities that you want to select. Are there any situations where this is tricky by using the lasso way?

Henrik Ekblom - User Experience Designer
Toontrack

[George Piazza]

I second (or third) many of these requests:

Jacek wrote:

The Superior Drummer 3 Tracker is a fantastic tool but could use a few improvements to make editing more efficient. These all apply to standalone mode, as that’s my main workflow at the moment.

1. Additional options in ‘select’ menu: ‘Select by velocity…’. A new box has options that will let you select all notes below a value, over a value. This will be very useful for creating a map only for snare ghost notes. It’s not precise enough to select by dragging the selection when zoomed out to see the whole track.
2. Playhead follows playback toggle. Just like the Pro Tools ‘n’ shortcut’. IWhen listening to my edits, I would catch a mistrigger and instinctively hit space bar to stop playback and take care of it. Unfortunately, this takes me back to where the playhead was originally at, so I have no idea where that missing note is if I wasn’t keeping my eye on the bar timeline
3. Turn off auto scrolling in the trigger editor
4. Zoom tool. Select a specific area and zoom into it. Much less tedious than having to drag the zoom brackets at the bottom
5. Lower priority, but a pre-roll value would be nice in the standalone version. Helpful when you are focusing on edits and want to hear some context without having to scroll around
6. The select similar knob could use a toggle to only select new notes after the playhead location. If I am editing notes and everything has been fine but then I come across a note that is not getting triggered, I want to select it, select similar and know that whatever work I have done up to this point not get affected. Otherwise, this adds another step to my work to verify I did not trigger anything I shouldn’t have.
7. It looks like it’s not a general issue but UI performance is making it difficult to work on my 2013 Mac Pro. Already created ticket 89300 but haven’t heard back yet.

1: I’ve worked with regions and it does make it easier, but it is still tricky or tedious to get ghost note triggering just right; also when an audio file has flams or ruffs in it (especially a snare track), it is very hard to match the sound & feel of the original. The SD3 library flams and ruffs don’t sync to tempo, nor do they sync in Tracker, so the only options are to use another articulation, which is less realistic / convincing, or possibly time stretch or compress the flams or ruffs (which I haven’t tried; even if this is possible, it would be exceedingly tedious).

2, 3, 4: Scrolling and zoom options are limited and make it very difficult to make adjustments, like the OP said. Almost every DAW has a variety of options to have the playback point either go back to the last start position, the beginning or stay where it was stopped. Having the latter would be a major workflow improvement.

Same with scrolling and the zoom features.

Also, if tempo adjustments are attempted while Tracker is in play mode and the Playhead scrolls past the zoomed area, the snap point is dragged to wherever the mouse is released in relation to the visual (i.e. it will get dragged past the original view into the newly scrolled view). With the limited zoom bar, this is a real hassle. One could stop playback before making adjustments, but then the problem of the Playhead resetting to the previous playback start position is again an issue.

I’d add one more: a time signature editor in the ‘Find Tempo’ editor. A song with a lot of complex time signature changes requires that one map them all out beforehand or use ‘find tempo’, then go back to the main window to determine the time signature of the next section (which is easier when the tempo is mapped up to that point), add a time signature, then go back into ‘Find Tempo’ mode; unfortunately, entering and exiting ‘Find Tempo’ mode has produced unpredictable results for me, even if I don’t change anything in the main tracker section.

With more playhead, zoom and scrolling options, the Tracker workflow would be greatly improved:

1. Scroll on /off
2.  Zoom in the audio timeline using a specialized zoom tool (either horizontal or a rectangular horizontal / vertical); perhap zoom / location snapshots as well for working with difficult sections.
3. Playhead return options, including ‘Playhead remains at stop point’.
4. Time Signature editing in the ‘Find Tempo’ mode.

Thanks!

[Dhruvnb]

New customer, and I’ve just begun to enjoy the beauty of Superior Drummer, but it is sad and extremely annoying to see that these issues are so old and nothing has been done to add really basic features like a zoom tool or work on the behaviour of the playhead (returning to its older position when music is stopped).

1

Thanked by: Donald Ryan

[Author]

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