Ouch.
After trying this out for some minutes, it really seems quite “beta”.
Im using it on a desktop PC with a proper mouse, so no trackpad.
It seems like it was built for Tablet-usage, wich is good; but I don’t think one should sacrifice desktop usability for touch use.
I’m going to compare this to the GLD-Editor, wich i have use a lot in the past.
At first glance, it appears a bit unclear in how this works. I still haven’t really understood how switching between the banks works.
The channelstrip encoders are clearly missing, the only way to change pan on the channels I have found, is through the “routing” menu and selecting the master.
This already leads to my next complaint: Mouse input is far from smooth, there’s always lag.For example take an EQ-Band and drag it around: in GLD-Editor, the dot will always be directly under the cursor – not in dlive-director.
In GLD-Editor, i could select a channel, open the “name and color” window, edit the entry and tab myself through the channels. This made setting up the mixer really easy and fast. It is not possible in dlive-director.
When clicking setup and then selecting the right widget area – and then closing the opened window again, without changing something, you have to click apply or discard, wich is really distracting, because you will ask yourself “What exactly have I done?” without having changed anything.
Switching through layers in this widget area has to be done by swiping, wich is okay on a tablet, but not really ergonomic with a mouse, a click-button would be nice.
The zoom-function in the I/O tab doesn’t really work: When opening this tab for the first time, it looks okay, but using the zoom-funktion once leads to eather way to big or way to small zoom factor.
Having to drag through the soft-buttons is also not really helpful (again, nice for tablet users to make the buttons big, but it also takes up lots of screen space whilst conveying not a lot of information.
Scrolling through effects is not really intuitive. Clicking directly on the drag-bar doesn’t work – clicking in the scroll bar is possible, but now the drag-bar doesn’t move together with the mouse, but much faster.
Right now it feels really uncomfortable using dlive director. Maybe it is possible to include some kind of “desktop operator” mode, that allows for better overall control. Being able to split the software in multiple windows would be really cool. (I am pretty much always using two screens when pre-programming shows. With GLD-Editor this was okay, ilive-editor was pretty cool in that regard.
This was my short review of the dlive director. I hope I haven’t been to harsh, but coming from GLD-Editor it felt like quite a step backwars, from my point of view. Not everything is bad about the director, but it already has taken quite a while to get the software, always with the excuse of not wanting to put out beta software. Please keep up the good work, I believe you have built some great consolees with good software in the past.
