This might be a very trivial question, but I’m tried searching various things online and couldn’t find anything regarding this topic. But is it possible in any way to group tracks (audio, returns) underneath a “parent” track or folder or dropdown? I’m not referring to routing tracks into another track, because that just creates more clutter. This is specifically a UI issue.
My use case is having events with many tracks and it can become hard to read. I’m certain everyone knows what I’m talking about. Being able to collapse tracks without having to change their height (which would still have them show all their content).
I can’t use nested events, as they work asynchronously and I get sync issues for my music event when getting lag spikes etc.
You would do something like, select two tracks, right click to bring up context menu and select group, or keyboard command cmd+G or ctrl+G.
It’s not impossible (and I’ve added your suggestion to our feature and improvement tracker, just in case), but it doesn’t seem likely.
We’re currently considering displaying track routing in a way that’s visually very similar to what you propose here, and having two different reasons why a track might appear under another track would likely cause confusion.
That doesn’t rule out the possibility of making tracks collapsible, however. We could potentially still do it, provided we could come up with some way of displaying it in a way that’s visually distinct and our developers believe the benefit of doing so outweighs the increased complexity it would add to FMOD Studio’s UI. Time will tell.
I would also think what you suggest is best in terms of not having any confusion, where they just route together to another track.
I would say for developers, most DAW’s have this and Unity and Unreal already work with hierarchies for setting up everything, so it should feel very familiar. Just the general idea of folders on a desktop is so commonly known, I can’t really see anyone misunderstand the basic concept.
Personally, I don’t need folders in FMOD for track grouping. However, a visual indicator that a track is re-routed would be very useful. Maybe even a spacer like the one in Reaper so returns could be separated from the tracks.
This is already available in the mixer view of both the event editor and the mixer, and you’ll be pleased to learn we’re planning to add it to the tracks view as well. I’ve added you to the list of people interested in this feature.
Thanks Joseph, the mixer visualisation especially paired with colours is very useful so I’m glad to hear you’re implementing something for the events also.
