In Ardour 4.X (and some earlier versions) the transport controls looked like this:
In current versions of Ardour 5.X, the transport control buttons are smaller and square, like so:
Although not as much a problem on desktops, if you are using a touch based recording setup (as I use for mobile recording on a tablet of mine) this can make things difficult if external transport controls are not used, as hitting the touch targets accurately (and quickly as at times is necessary) is more difficult with their current shape. In my experience when hitting a touch target vertical accuracy is more reduced than horizontal accuracy. The buttons on Ardour 4.X worked amazingly well for this (and this is something I wish other DAWs considered) but the smaller, vertically shorter buttons on Ardour 5.X inspire a greater number of fumbles in my use of the software. I love every other improvement over 4 (so using the old version isn’t all that feasible at this point) but an option to change how they are drawn on screen and how large the touch targets were to how they were on 4.X would be amazing.
Sorry, we have no plans to revert those changes. Almost all other DAWs use significantly less screen real estate for their transport sections than Ardour 4.x did, and screen real estate is of prime importance. There’s an argument that the GUI elements for the transport controls don’t even matter that much because (a) many people who use a lot will have a control surface (or OSC app on a tablet that can have a more “touch appropriate” GUI) (b) there are keybindings for all the transport ops.
I do get your point, and I suppose it is a fairly rare use case, but I was hoping it could be an option that could be selected (even if it is deactivated by default.) Often I will use a tablet (without an attached keyboard) for a small amount of recording, and then do basic mixing on a bus ride or somewhere else where juggling multiple devices is cumbersome. I’ll have to see how feasible it would be to personally fork the code and merge those parts of ardour4 with ardour5 as a base.
Thanks for your time, Paul. Love the work you do, and really couldn’t get by that easily without it.
Just a thought. how about a new floating window “Big Transport Controls” that the user could activate through the window menu ? There are several other selectable floating windows there at the moment, this would fit nicely among them.
