ideas for look and feel

two ideas really. one is basically a revamp of the gtk engine look, the other a suggestion for the level meters.

first, the gtk revamp.

one thing i notice when i look at screenshots of programs like protools and logic, i think that the controls etc look much more modern than ardour’s. i believe this is mainly due to the use of clearlooks as the engine. whilst it can give a clean appearence, i think it lacks the ‘wow’ feel a bit. i’m not suggesting anything over the top, and i don’t think this is an urgent issue, but maybe we can work on an ‘unofficial’ skin for ardour that is more up to date in appearance. i have been playing around a little bit, and one thing that struck me is that changing the engine in the gtkrc file to something like murrina makes a huge difference. is there any technical reason as to why i should not look down this path (even to make an unofficial skin for myself)? maybe performance or compatibility with osx??

anyway, here is a little snapshot of how much of a difference it makes (i kept the colour scheme the same for now, but i will play around with that too). click on the image for a fullscreen shot.

if there is no technical reason why i should stop, i’ll keep playing :slight_smile:

second: i tried to do this myself a bit, but i got out of my depth.
i find the level meters don’t seem to fit with the look of ardour. i think it is mainly the colours used. i played around in the ‘fastmeter.cc’ file and got some nice blueish peak meters, and also got a (hackish) red overload area working. i think they look quite cool:

what i haven’t been able to do is get an ‘rms’ or ‘average’ reading on the meters, as well as the peak level reading. this is for two reasons - 1: the actual calculations i am not certain of, and 2: how to put them on the meter correctly. i have a feeling that this will be rejected outright, as i seem to recall that these calculations are very slow, but maybe we can have some sort of approximation that would still be fast? the rough look i wanted is as below (sorry about my crap inkscape skills) and is basically the peak level being at 50% opacity, and the rms level 100% (this could be cheated with darker colours etc):

thanks :slight_smile:
porl

i have been playing more with the level meters, and i got sick of the green. i also experimented with a pseudo-led-segment look. not sure which i prefer, but i think the colours definitely match ardour’s dark scheme better.

porl

porl - doug has just about finished making the meter gradients be based on user-definable colors. stand by.

hehe i knew i was probably doing something redundant :slight_smile: oh well, i’m still learning things from it :slight_smile:

porl

just did a svn update and saw the new meters. nice work :slight_smile: could there perhaps be one more option for the clip colours (to allow subtle gradients like my screenshots have)? otherwise, perfect :slight_smile:

is it at all possible to do the ‘peak + rms’ meter type? i know (from looking at how the meters are implemented) that it would probably be a fair amount of work, but i think they would be very useful. if performance is an issue, maybe make it optional (i can turn it on for the track i’m interested in and turn it off again afterwards).

porl