Ableton Forum

Track colours are great, and they're very good cues in arrangement view. In session view however, they only affect the topmost area of a track. When viewing the mixer, the track name and colour are on top, while record, volume, solo and pan are at the bottom. Moving my eyes up and down is slightly tiring.

Fully saturated colours look good on small areas, but for the volume fader area, I chose example variations according to whether track text is black or white. Ableton's designers could determine what to do to make things look better, and what to do with white or very bright colours:

Black text: Original colour -> half the saturation, twice the brightness
White text: Original colour -> half the saturation, brightness of 150 (of 255)

There are probably better colour choices or alternative ideas, but I'm pretty sure something like this would improve the user experience, at least for me personally.

Also, maybe the area below the record buttons could also be used to display the track name + colour, just like in the top area.

Thanks! I know my mock-up isn't that pretty, but in the hands of skilled designers, I think the concept should work really well.

Also, I would love to have automatic numbering in the track names, rather than explicitly entering "# trackname".

The yolour should be on the whole track! not just on the mixer and Trackname.
Thats a simple to realize wish.

Nice idea. Thanks!

Just like this

Or that the whole Track (like Protools) has the same colour as the Trackname!
What du you think about this?

i dont like the whole track coloured that confuses the clip colours on top of it....the saturation brightness idea is what I have tryed mention before....half the colours are uselsesss because you cant read the dam fonts against them.

Right! with some colours it is very difficult to read the fonts.
Maybe a black border around the fonts is a solve.

Great idea! this would make things a lot easier to locate.

They could also add a mixer view in the arrangement at the bottom where the clip view/device view is, seems to be plenty of room to add another tab next to them & would stop the need to keep switching between arrangement & session view to make mixer adjustments.

Look at Bitwig, they realized a very good colouring for tracks and clips.
Dear ableton Team - You can do that

Inj the latest updates Ableton fixed the colour problems - now you can read the text with every colour

But you still can't read black writing against dark background in the drum/midi editor and a few other places. They are improving. Not there yet.

I love the mixer colouring idea of the original post. Especially if Abes added more colour choices. Abes are a bit stubborn about their interface. Not appreciating people's differences.

Idonotlikebroccoli wrote:Track colours are great, and they're very good cues in arrangement view. In session view however, they only affect the topmost area of a track. When viewing the mixer, the track name and colour are on top, while record, volume, solo and pan are at the bottom. Moving my eyes up and down is slightly tiring.

Fully saturated colours look good on small areas, but for the volume fader area, I chose example variations according to whether track text is black or white. Ableton's designers could determine what to do to make things look better, and what to do with white or very bright colours:

Black text: Original colour -> half the saturation, twice the brightness
White text: Original colour -> half the saturation, brightness of 150 (of 255)

There are probably better colour choices or alternative ideas, but I'm pretty sure something like this would improve the user experience, at least for me personally.

Also, maybe the area below the record buttons could also be used to display the track name + colour, just like in the top area.

Much needed. +1

Martin Gifford wrote:I love the mixer colouring idea of the original post. Especially if Abes added more colour choices.

Yeah, it would be nice with support for hex values. Then you could find a set of harmonising colours anywhere, such as https://color.adobe.com/nb/create/color-wheel/

It would also be good to have favourite colours. I don't want to meticulously choose from a 12x5 grid - 12x1 would be enough for me, or even 6x1.

Alternatively, I quite like Bitwig's automatic colouring. It makes it easy to find tracks, and it's nice not having to think about colouring when making music. Also, their colour selector is smaller, and feels nicer to use for me.

Also: mixer in arrangement, please!

Would be very helpful (with an option to switch this feature on/off). I use live for mixing sometimes more than 100 tracks.

Even the lists in the track ins and outs should be colour coded.

Like this: