Well now it is there, and it is optional, and should silence those who feel they need something like that.

However I find it pointless, apart from channel output metering which I would like to have in the normal veiw. It's vertical and looks like a hardware mixer - that's all. Oh, yeah, and it takes up a bunch of screen real-estate pretty much repeating information that is just as accessable in the standard track view.

Remember all those posts over the years wondering where the mixing screen was, and SoSoFo reminding us of how the idea was just totally superfluous?!!

All in all it's a gain for the application, apart from maybe distracting users away from the (in my view) more elegant and efficient mixing methods.

geoff

In the last century, when Cakewalk was making noises about adding a console view (after it had given us vector/envelope control, FCS!), I objected -- same as I have here, but with coarser language -- to wasted development resources.

As a lover of Madison's world view (a UI that makes complete sense to me), my main concern about V8 was whether or not it would be possible to function completely without the cartoon UI. I am happy to report that the regular Vegas UI gives me everything but the individual track meters. (At first, it was necessary to invoke Cakewalk's console for a couple of little switch things, but that annoyance went away quickly. I hope for similar progress here)

I did notice that, with my oldish 3.0 CPU/1 GB RAM, V8 struggles to play 27 audio tracks (w/ relatively few plug-ins running) with the, er, "Mixing Console" open. With other apps, the same system runs 50+ tracks with way more plug-ins without a hiccup.

Gimme some decent meters in the regular Vegas UI, and you won't hear a peep out of me. Meanwhile, maybe I should go with the flow: Finish a mix, smoke a joint, open the Console View, and watch them moving faders.

That's just virtual. Get a BCF2000 and watch 'real' moving faders - that's real freaky !

geoff

Next you'll be doing a "mexican wave" with the faders (if you haven't - go on, you know you want to :) )

The BCF2000 has no guts for launching items off the moving faders though..... Now Yamaha - they're a bit more snappy,,,, Teehee....It was a calm at the studio that day.......

I think you guys are missing the point a little with the Console. I never wanted one either but here's what is gained:

Much snappier access to Plugins. Ideally there would be access to Plugin Chains here and there would be a drag and drop functionality between tracks and busses, but it's still a work-in-progress.

A view of Sends that isn't just on the timeline. You can see up to four different sends per track/bus at a time.

You can gang busses and tracks for fader moves and automation.

You can assign your I/O more easily.

And it's all in one place.

In the future I hope to be able to:
Save Mixing Groups (groups of tracks and/or busses that move together)

Save Mixing Layouts (save snapshots of your Mixing Layout i.e. I want to just have a Busses only view or a Tracks only view. Or a view of Tracks 1,4,7, and 8 and Buss 1 and Assignable Effect 1...etc. and I want to just see the faders and FX, no sends or I/O)

Save Mixing "States": be able to recall different mixes (I want to hear my drum-heavy version vs. my vocal heavy version)

I think it has the potential to be very powerful. If you have two monitors, make it full screen and put it on Monitor 2.

Well, I welcome it with open arms.

Not because it's necessary (as others have said, it doesn't add any real functionality per se) and I don't envision myself making much use of it - I'm quite happy working the old (horizontal) way.

But because I strongly suspect that if the decision had not been made to devote the development resources to producing it we would never have got the fixes/improvements to the panning and routing that we have been asking for for the last few versions.

Mark

yep, its all about the routing for me. The changes described sound like improvements but if I can't send a stereo track to two places at once and keep it stereo than the new mixer is going to stay disabled 99% of the time.

Jesse

well, first of all, all tracks in Vegas are stereo. And, you could do that before. Just set up two Busses and send the track to both of them. Using the console lets you see this all at once.

OK, it is improved from the last time I looked at it. My hangup is that none of the buss or effect sends are post pan - you have to insert the pan effect on each track - this can't be seen in any global view as far as I know (I'm on 7 waiting for 8)

Jesse

are you talking about the new feature which allows you to tell the send to "follow track pan"? If you drop the multi-purpose menu down n the Track Header and select the Buss/Effect you want to send to, if you right click the send fader you'll see "Link to Main Track Pan". I think that's what you're asking for?

For a bus, sends are always post pan.

For a bus, inserts FX are post pan if the inserts are post fader. So the audio stream is panned then sent to the insert chain.

If the inserts are pre fader, then the FX chain is pre pan. So the audio stream is sent to the insert chain and the output of the insert chain is panned.

For tracks, you can link the send to follow the track pan.

You should look at the signal flow diagram in the Vegas 8 user manual on page 38,

Peter

Peter,
Looks like a good improvement on routing. I can't wait to get my copy of 8 to check it out.

Jesse

Vegas8 Console is great, and there's lots of ways to customize it. Pity the 5.1 Constant Power Panner is still not working, but in all other respects this is the dog's bollocks!

Though with the new console if you mouse over a fader you cannot use your mousewheel to adjust the volume you must left click on it and drag up/down. Not a big deal to me due to the fact I use my mackie mcu to mix.

I just bought the vegas upgrade and tried it out a bit. I got to say I'm impressed with it. Man I just got spoiled by acid with it's track folders. I really miss it. I'm sure this bit of code will make it into the next version of acid...then again the invert track phase switch has been on order since version 1 so who knows. ;)

FYI...For anyone using UAD plugins go to the control pref for the UAD and select "sonar compatiblility mode". The cpu munching on my system went down and I'm not sure why. I'll be testing tweaking some more soon and I'll send you guys a bug report.

Ed.

Though with the new console if you mouse over a fader you cannot use your mousewheel to adjust the volume you must left click on it and drag up/down.

This works for me. Make sure that some other window has not grabbed the focus away from the mixer console. FX windows can do this.

I've seen this same problem with the mouse-ove wheel not working. Not sure what the repro is. Maybe it's Busses and not tracks or something. I'll look further

There does remain the problem, after many years (may be an inherent Windows low-level thing) that Tweakui X-Mouse emulation is activated (surely EVERYBODY working in a multi-pane windowed environment uses this, no ? ... where active window is selected by cursor hover...) is not fully implement wrt mouse-wheel.

The problem in Vegas remains that although the window focus changes OK, the mouse -wheel focus remains on the last control used until a new control clicked. For example use wheel on plugin window level slider. Move cursor to track view and window focus changes. Spin the mouse-wheel and the inactive-window plugin slider moves.

geoff