am i really the only one?? (sluggish edit window)

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CEIsar
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am i really the only one?? (sluggish edit window)

Post by CEIsar » Fri Oct 05, 2012 7:35 am

maybe i should wait until the 1.03 update will be available but the bug status thread says nothing about this (at least for me) serious issue :the supersluggish edit screen.

i should explain myself first:i'm a "typical" producer of electronic music (mainly but i'm doing sounddesign for companies and adding sounds to videoclips as well).I was working with Cubase/Nuendo since Atari times and i'm working with Logic since 3-4 years now.Usually i'm working like this:

1.Setting a cycle between 4-8 bars long
2.doing the creative job (means:filling all the tracks with content)
3.record/bounce most Midi/instrument to audiotracks
4.start to arrange (and mix) the song (with a lot of smaller region-edits and automation over the time)

So,really nothing special here.I personally know dozens of musicians (if not hundreds...)working like this.

On my ipads i'm mainly working with beatmaker 2 (combined with different synths apps and virtual midi).After finishing the creative part i want to export as audiotrax and arrange(and mix) the stuff
in auria.But the zooming and scrolling (in worst case vertical scrolling can take several seconds!) in auria makes it nearly impossible to fall in something like a usable workflow.Maybe i have "wrong" priorities but a smooth and fast operation in a DAW is nearly as important as audio quality to me.

when i mentioned this flaw in another forum i got something back like"scroll/zoom slowly" or "displaying waveforms needs a lot of power".

The first one (scroll slowly) might be an option but not a solution,while the second one confuses me a bit.I remember smooth operations with Cubase VST on a Pentium III 500 and a hell lot of displayed waverforms.I even remember a smoother operation with Cubase Audio on a 486.

Is a Dual Core really not able to handle this properly?Beatmaker or Multitrack DAW are working like a charm,no matter how many audio tracks i use (i didn`t count).Lightspeed operation i would say.But they are lacking other things of course.Features (Multitrack)or audio quality (effects in BM2).And i know Auria is the only one that features a vertical zoom,that's a very important option for sure.And quite cpu/memory hungry i guess.

IMO it was a mistake to made auria look like expensive hardware,Multitrack DAW made the better decision.That's really an ipad app.Not with hundreds of small and fiddly knobs.But i understand:you gonna sell more copies if it looks expensive and like something that most of the user never could afford in real hardware.And Multitrack (as mentioned above)is lacking a LOT of other things..

Maybe it's all fine for people who just record some very long takes in a rehearsal room but i can't believe there are no people working with auria in a similar way i want.


To make it clear:i'm NOT talking about huge projects here.Just importing 8-10 audio tracks (4-8 bars long) to a new project.Nothing is arranged/copied so far and even with NO effects at all.


The auria promotion suggest it's working fine with up to 48 tracks.In my opinion,that's simply not true.A DAW is not only a multitrack recorder,it includes the word "workstation".

I love auria and i'm really looking forward how it will grow in the future.But i can't understand that nobody is complaining (at least it seems to me)about this issue.Instead:people complain about missing retina resolution.C'mon,it's sluggish enough...

Meteor Multitrack has an option to deactivate the waveform display if things getting to busy for the cpu/gpu.i could live with it if auria would at least implement this option.Still not perfect though,cause for every edit operation i need to go to settings screen to switch between both options then...but at least it wouldn't bother me all the time while i try to arrange a song.
Last edited by CEIsar on Fri Oct 05, 2012 9:01 am, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: am i really the only one?? (sluggish edit window)

Post by Dubhausdisco » Fri Oct 05, 2012 8:50 am

Which iPad are you using?
Is auria the only app running while using it?

Bottom line is that the true strength of ANY iOS music app right now is portability.
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Re: am i really the only one?? (sluggish edit window)

Post by CEIsar » Fri Oct 05, 2012 9:10 am

Dubhausdisco wrote:Which iPad are you using?
Is auria the only app running while using it?

Bottom line is that the true strength of ANY iOS music app right now is portability.
yes,everything is closed.WLAN and Bluetooth off.Makes no difference.
I have two ipad 2.Same experience on both pads for sure.
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Re: am i really the only one?? (sluggish edit window)

Post by Geronimo » Fri Oct 05, 2012 10:02 am

I have Auria plus most of the plug ins, but i stopped using it some time ago now, because it's just too slow and buggy right now to create any kind of reasonable workflow for sounddesign work. I love the whole thing and what it tries to do, but i'm having not much fun using it because it doesn't feel very intuitive, due to the slowness.

You know, the whole tablet experience, especially on iOS, comes from the immediate response on your fingertips. It's all about the flow, the joy of fluid interaction.. I don't have that with Auria at the moment. Rim said there will be some display options that could speed things up, and i honestly think i'll just wait until then before i'm getting deep into again. I even thought about buying MeteoR in the meantime, just to have that intuitive feeling with a DAW now, but that would be a bit much, i guess.

Plus some of the bugs, like samples getting deleted completely all of a sudden, are a major obstacle for me to get back to work with Auria right now.

I'll give it the required time now and will definitely come back to it when it's there. I honestly think it will become THE iOS DAW some day, but it just isn't there yet.

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Re: am i really the only one?? (sluggish edit window)

Post by CEIsar » Fri Oct 05, 2012 10:37 am

Geronimo wrote:
You know, the whole tablet experience, especially on iOS, comes from the immediate response on your fingertips. It's all about the flow, the joy of fluid interaction.. I don't have that with Auria at the moment. Rim said there will be some display options that could speed things up, and i honestly think i'll just wait until then before i'm getting deep into again. I even thought about buying MeteoR in the meantime, just to have that intuitive feeling with a DAW now, but that would be a bit much, i guess.
i totally agree with you,that was the reason i bought Multitrack a couple of days ago.But i stopped
working with it in the same second i realized i can not select more then one region at once.
I was thinking hard about meteor as well but 12 tracks is simply not enough for my needs.But good
to read that they are working on speeding up the display.That's all i want,i know it's still a Version
1 software.I'm just a little scared that they"forget"the current user when there will be the ipad 4...and probably no need for optimizing (visual) performance anymore.

i'm glad i hold on my trigger finger before i bought the auria plugins now.But i will buy some of them later for sure.I'm really excited that i can get my favorite eq (pro q)on ipad^^
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Re: am i really the only one?? (sluggish edit window)

Post by Geronimo » Fri Oct 05, 2012 11:01 am

I'm using an iPad 3 and it's not very smooth, so i'll guess the iPad 4 won't change much about it. Also, there's no need for Apple to boost up the performance significantly, because nearly everything in the app-store works very smoothly already.

So, i don't see any real reason why they would change their plans to improve Auria as much as possible. And i think they're trying their best :) But to be really honest, i think we're all beta testers right now, lol. But i'm fine with that, as long as it all works out in the end.

But even when all the bugs are gone, the slowness of the display would still be a downer.
Last edited by Geronimo on Fri Oct 05, 2012 11:12 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: am i really the only one?? (sluggish edit window)

Post by Geronimo » Fri Oct 05, 2012 11:02 am

Pro Q is amazing and one of the reasons i'll stay with Auria for quite a while :)

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Re: am i really the only one?? (sluggish edit window)

Post by beat » Fri Oct 05, 2012 12:29 pm

I agree with both @geronimo and @CEIsar

Auria is usable for me but it does get laggy just scrolling through 8-12 tracks mostly mono and 2 or 3 stereo. I still use the 1st version though on both my iPad 2 and 3 because it works fine for what I use it for and didn't like the bugs that I heard about in the latest version. Waiting for v1.04.

All-inAll I love using Auria but the lag does slow down your flow because you don't want to end up editing or shifting aTrack out of place when trying to scroll through your precisely placed and edited Tracks.

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Re: am i really the only one?? (sluggish edit window)

Post by DavePDX » Fri Oct 05, 2012 1:22 pm

For me, running an iPad 3, I find that the edit window is pretty fluid most of the time, with a few exceptions. However, I rarely am running more than 6 or 8 tracks, and generally have no more than 2 plugins running on any track.

- Editing control points, especially multiple control points is pretty clumsy and not very responsive
- Occasionally it's difficult to get a region into Move mode. It will change color, but either not move or move after a significant delay
- Occasionally editing multiple regions gets sluggish or even produces odd results, such as a non-selected region being included in the result

The occasional issues seem to be iOS background task or memory release related. I do wonder how much impact the fancy graphics have on performance.

That said, this is still hands down my favorite DAW for the iPad, and I own most all of them. My other favorite DAW for iOS is MultiTrack, which has a very minimalistic GUI. It's extremely stable and fluid, but it's lacking many of the features that make Auria so appealing. I suspect however, that it's precisely the focus on stability over features that make it so fluid. I'll continue to use MT for some things because it's universal, so I can run it on my iPhone as well, and it's much faster to set up to record. (for example, you can select the input directly from the track and also set the track to be stereo or mono).

There's generally going to be some tradeoff between features and performance, and mostly, it seems to me Auria has made very good choices. I hope and expect that it will improve and continue to resolve the issues, but in the meantime, I'm finding I can get a lot of high quality results from it.

Some of the things that really set it apart for me:

- The sound quality, plugins, editing, and overall workflow are all far superior to everything else on iOS
- Being able to edit multiple regions across tracks is huge
- The ability to silence and alter the gain of regions or selections is fantastic
- Automation that's simple to use and really works!
- The region info section is extremely well implemented... will be even better if they add region naming
- Back on topic, zooming and scrolling in the edit window is FAR superior to anything else out there for iOS. Maybe it's the iPad 3, I haven't tried Auria on the older iPads, but for me it's very fast, fluid and intuitive

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Re: am i really the only one?? (sluggish edit window)

Post by ChrisG » Fri Oct 05, 2012 2:43 pm

Seems like priority número uno was not really for electronic and/or loop based producing but for stuff like the demo projects, as evident by ie bars:beats being completely out of sync with the audio. Auria needs a smoother edit window for sure but that's on the table (lower quality waveforms option or something I believe it was) so that's good. Being able to move around regions fast, select multiple regions and automation points fast and so on etc is a must for more electronic based producing. Just needs a smoother/faster workflow for projects using lots of little regions etc. How I'm sure Rim & co will figure out. They made Auria after all which is awesome. As mentioned above there are still some weird bugs to sort out in general with the edit window. So priority nr 1 after fixing the most glaring general bugs should be the edit window's workflow/design.

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Re: am i really the only one?? (sluggish edit window)

Post by Geronimo » Fri Oct 05, 2012 3:01 pm

Don't get me wrong, Auria is great for what it is, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be better. The bugs are one thing, and eventually they'll all get wiped out. But the workflow and everything that contributes to it is another thing. For me, having a smooth (work) experience is almost as important as the quality of the sound. That's what makes the tablet such a joy, most of times. It feels very straightforward, especially when it comes to creative things. I love touching sounds and everything that has to do with it, so it's only natural that i would love to have my DAW of choice as intuitive as possible, and the immediate response of the interface is a crucial factor here.

Maybe it will never be as fast as what we're used to on iOS, owed to it's superior capabilites. That's okay, but a little improvement would help me a lot here :)

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Re: am i really the only one?? (sluggish edit window)

Post by instinctive » Fri Oct 05, 2012 4:56 pm

This problem has been mentioned over and over again, and I don't understand why it doesn't get top priority for fixing.

I have coded most of the video/audio sequencer in Blender (the 3D software), also using OpenGL (just like what Auria uses). The CPU/GPU power of an iPad 1 is well enough to smoothly draw lots of waveforms, however, one needs to collect and implement a few optimization ideas. This is seemingly something that didn't have priority yet at Wavemachine Labs.

But heck, even (and especially) if they can't / won't / don't have time to optimize the waveform drawing, they should at least disable waveforms entirely during zoom operations.

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Re: am i really the only one?? (sluggish edit window)

Post by CEIsar » Fri Oct 05, 2012 5:04 pm

instinctive wrote:, they should at least disable waveforms entirely during zoom operations.
thats a pretty good idea for a quick fix and should be easy to implement.but i would like to add: zooming AND scrolling operations :)
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Re: am i really the only one?? (sluggish edit window)

Post by instinctive » Fri Oct 05, 2012 5:59 pm

Blah, zooming obviously included scrolling (?!) ;-)

And yes, this is a *really* easy workaround, and it would be similarly easy to simply detect the framerate during drawing, and if it's lower than, say, 10 fps, turn off waveform drawing and only show placeholders.

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Re: am i really the only one?? (sluggish edit window)

Post by mtingle » Fri Oct 05, 2012 6:08 pm

instinctive wrote:Blah, zooming obviously included scrolling (?!) ;-)

And yes, this is a *really* easy workaround, and it would be similarly easy to simply detect the framerate during drawing, and if it's lower than, say, 10 fps, turn off waveform drawing and only show placeholders.
or perhaps only draw full sample accurate resolution when zoomed in (which may already be the case). but there is definitely no need to draw every single sample when zoomed out.

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