Re-sizable group track headers

[iainduncan]

+1, this was irking me today. It really hampers the visual usability of the arrange mode if groups are in use for just grouping (ie, no automation).

[redlester]

+1. incredibly irritating and nonsensical.

[scg]

+1. Just ran into this. This seems to limit the usefulness of groups in arrange view considerably.

[dormin]

+1 the little track overviews are not useful enough to justify the big fat minimized group tracks.

[nival]

+1

[jonljacobi]

I don't like the current behavior at all, but I do wonder why it's done that way. It must have something to do with the way one of the devs, or testers works with the mouse. I could possibly imagine a scenario where someone wants to quickly resize and view/hide groups. I'd love for Ableton to chime in and explain it.

Actually, I'd love Ableton to chime in and explain a lot of their odder interface elements and choices. Most I find insanely clever, but I'm not seeing the logic behind this one.

[awekid]

+1 Please make it OPTIONAL to have the ghosted mini arrangement of the contents of the group displayed. Nested groups become ridiculous very quickly. So much wasted space.

I find Ableton's lack of user options verging on Apple's arrogance. No you can't re-assign a keyboard shortcut. We've already chosen all the best ones for you.

Do Ableton devs ever respond to any forum posts? Spent a bit of time on the forums the last few weeks and it feels like a ghost town with a few tourists still milling about.

[scg]

+1 Please make it OPTIONAL to have the ghosted mini arrangement of the contents of the group displayed. Nested groups become ridiculous very quickly. So much wasted space.

I find Ableton's lack of user options verging on Apple's arrogance. No you can't re-assign a keyboard shortcut. We've already chosen all the best ones for you.

Do Ableton devs ever respond to any forum posts? Spent a bit of time on the forums the last few weeks and it feels like a ghost town with a few tourists still milling about.

Glad to see someone else post about this As I've noted elsewhere, this can really limit the usefulness of groups, which is too bad (they're a nice feature otherwise).

I haven't been active here recently, but my experience here is that while it's not super active, there are some people involved with Ableton who read and post here occasionally (or at least it's been that way in the past). Sending feedback to Ableton directly (there's at least a couple ways to do that) is probably the best bet, but realistically, I don't know that this particular improvement is likely to be a high priority for the developers. Hope I'm proven wrong though.

I will say in Apple's defense that Logic does in fact have a very powerful customizable shortcut system - something Apple definitely got right in that case!

[Tarekith]

Do Ableton devs ever respond to any forum posts? Spent a bit of time on the forums the last few weeks and it feels like a ghost town with a few tourists still milling about.

The forums are just for users to discuss Live, it's not an official support outlet.

[maxdonosos]

+1 . I understand how the people at Ableton thought it in terms of "buss density", but it actually doesn't seem to serve any better purpose.

[marchseveth]

+1
I can understand that the group track needs to show the stems when the group track is folded. So I cannot reduce the height-size too small.
But when I unfold group track, I don't need to look at the stem's thumbnail, because all tracks are unfolded, I can just look at my tracks directly. The height-size still cannot be reduced too small.

[polliwogdev]

+1. It greatly hinders my productivity by wasting screen space and makes the Group Tracks feature useless for my workflow.

[TRNMTH]

+1

Nuendo's Folder Track management is interesting (think of it as the equivalent of Ableton's group management). When the folder is folded, it's possible to work on the object as a solid virtual element of all the components. Today, this is possible with Ableton's time selection, but movements are less flexible. In the preferences, it is possible to have three states for this behavior "Show Data on Folder Tracks" : Always Show Data, Never Show Data, Hide Data when Expanded.