Mixbus provides several ways to navigate the editor canvas.
Keyboard commands, buttons, the mouse-wheel (or 2-finger scroll on a touchpad ), and scrollbar-like widgets are supported, and each method has its own strengths (and weaknesses).
Why is this so complicated?
Editing digital audio is not an easy task. Relatively few people have the interest, or need, to investigate all the details that go into a high-end professional workstation. It’s a multi-dimensional problem with unlimited tracks, which might be audio, midi, or even video. And it’s all changing on a timeline: a concept you won’t find in a word processor or spreadsheet. Screen space is limited and there is a LOT of information that can be presented.
Users have different expectations, different workflows, and different devices ( mice, touchpads, etc ). Nearly every workstation has a different set of conventions, and if you’ve learned the conventions for one DAW, you might expect those same conventions to work on Mixbus; but alas there is not a widely-accepted way of working. ( the same problem occurs in image-editing and other software … there are very few conventions that transfer from one system to another )
Furthermore, conventions that work on some software don’t apply well to an audio workstation. Consider a scrollbar: you’ve probably found that a scrollbar works great for a spreadsheet until the number of items in the list becomes several hundred screens worth of data; then the scrollbar jumps around too fast to be useful. In an audio workstation, the timeline is potentially 24 hours long or more, and you can zoom in to see a screenful of individual samples. This can require upwards of 100,000 screens of information, which doesn’t fit well on a scrollbar.
Learning to navigate the editor canvas
The best way to learn about Mixbus’s conventions is by watching an experienced user – in person or via video. An experienced user will navigate the timeline effortlessly, using each of the available tools for their specific purpose.
These chapters provide an overview of the most common navigation features:
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