Audacity Forum

It has been noticed that there are inconsistencies in the naming of a part of the Audacity interface. As this can lead to confusion and misunderstanding, it is obviously beneficial if the naming of parts of Audacity is consistent throughout the documentation, and preferably also in discussions.

Below is a picture of a stereo audio track - the entire thing is called a "track".

The questions are, "what would you call the area that is highlighted", or "what do you think the highlighted area should be called"?
Opinions from ordinary users that are new to Audacity are particularly welcome, as the terminology should make sense to all, though more experienced users are also welcome to make suggestions.

stevethefiddle wrote:It has been noticed that there are inconsistencies in the naming of a part of the Audacity interface. As this can lead to confusion and misunderstanding, it is obviously beneficial if the naming of parts of Audacity is consistent throughout the documentation, and preferably also in discussions.

I do want to clarify the Manual is not inconsistent or (we hope) too confusing in itself. The problem is a potential confusion between the Manual and the computer code the developers work with, such that the red highlighted piece in the Manual has a similar name in the code that means something different. Have you been confused by what that part does or what it's called? If you can help us decide a meaningful name for it, we could rename it to everyone's benefit.



Gale

The manual refers to it as the Track Panel and is, I think, consistent in that. However, the name doesn't give any indication of what the panel does.
What about "Track Control Panel"?

POL

Irish wrote:The manual refers to it as the Track Panel and is, I think, consistent in that. However, the name doesn't give any indication of what the panel does.
What about "Track Control Panel"?

POL

That (or "Track Controls Panel" to avoid a "possible" confusion with OS control panels) is of course an obvious choice, but Bill and I have some problems with it. There is a possible confusion with Control Toolbar (the Play/Record/Stop/Pause/Skip buttons) and the feeling that inexperienced users will only see the two sliders as "controls". This could mean they will see Track Control(s) Panel as only the area around the sliders, making it even easier than now to disregard the Track Drop-Down Menu.

I asked 50 Audacity Beta users who asked me "how do I" questions by e-mail in the last three months the following questions:

1. "When you have a track open, there is a "Thing" to left of the track (circled). We're trying to see if it's named intuitively. What name would you give to it to convey what it does? Don't tell us what it's called now unless you think that name is correct."

2. "If you had a stereo track and wanted to split it into left and right channels each with their own track, or wanted to make two mono tracks into stereo, where do you do that in Audacity Beta?"

[Note we do not give technical support by e-mail, but for those who request it we ask them to come to the Forum for future questions].

I mainly chose the first 50 users I found, only excluding two people who were obviously very savvy as reflected by the terms they were using in their question. As far as I know these were not Forum users at the time. I told them the results of the answers would be summarised online, but nothing personally identifiable would be published. I got 38 replies and looks like I have got most I am going to get now.

1. What would you call the "Thing" to left of the track? (votes in brackets)

* Mixing Panel (5)

* Mixer Board (4)
(one said he was aware of View > Mixer Board but thought it was misnamed as both views with or without Mixer Board are about mixing)

* Volume Controls (4)

* Track Controls (4)

* Track Panel (4)

* Sliders Panel (3)

* Track Controls Panel (2)

* Control Box (2)

* Slider Widget (2)

* Volume Control Board (1)

* Volume Board (1)

* Listening Controls Box (1)

* Track Control Panel (1)

* Track Board (1)

* Track Manager Panel (1)

* Volume Control Surface (1)

* Track Data Control (1)

So it looks like 22 of the 36 think only volume or mixing are controlled by the "Thing". Most of the responses include "Panel", "Control", "Controls" or "Board" but most (30) only use two words to describe the Thing. I quite like "Manager" though only one vote near the bottom. I wonder if we can do anything with that? Would "Track Manager" convey better than "Track Panel" all the controls on the Thing?


2. "If you had a stereo track and wanted to split it into left and right channels each with their own track, or wanted to make two mono tracks into stereo, where do you do that in Audacity Beta?" (paraphrased answers)

* Don't know (15)
* Don't know, but this seems a missing feature (8)
* You can do both in the "Thing" you're asking about, but it's too hard to find that out (6)
* Should be able to do it with the Tracks Menu, but seems you can't (4)
* You can do both in the "Thing" you're asking about (3)
* You can do one in the "Thing" you're asking about and the other in the Tracks Menu (2)

So same problem as in Question 1, but worse than I thought given we were pointing people to the Thing that did what we were asking about.

I'd like to get more interest from Forum users than we've seen so far. I'd suggest we could copy this as a sticky to the three 1.3.x boards for each platform.



Gale

Gale,

as you know my vote is for Track Controls Panel (though I could be swayed to Stevethefiddle's suggestion gleaned from a bit of research with an inxperienced Audacity user of: "Track Conrols Box").

And my reasoning for that is:
a) it's part of the track - a track is (for an audio track) : the "Thing", the vertical ruler and the audio itself (in whatever form the user has chosen to display)
b) it contains controls: the pan and gain sliders, the Mute and Solo buttons, the X-button (track delete) and the somewhat "hidden" menu drop-down.
c) it is a "panel" - a rectangular pane (could be a box)

Addressing your point 2): the longer I look at the "Thing" I suspect that one of the reasons that the LDPBT (the Little-Downward-Pointing-Black-Triangle in the "Thing") gets overlooked as a drop-down access to a menu is that it doesn't look like a clickable button. The developrs have somewhat confused things by making the track-name and thhe LDBPT a single clickable entity for access to the track menu. Copared this with the delete-track X which does look like, and indeed is, a clickable button.

So I for one would certainly vote for detaching the LDPBT from the track-name and making it grahically into a proper button. There are other LDPBTs in the Audacity GUI and all of those are clearly bottons (e.g. the two that are in the meter toolbar for the input and output meters). In this case the track-name could remain clickable but I would suggest that clicking on the trackname should just put the used into trackname edit mode to rename the track.

WC

There are a number of considerations here. Those who have been involved in the -quality thread will know what I'm talking about.

I have no problem with "Track Panel", but I am not opposed to renaming it. My preference for "Track Panel" is that it is generic - it contains controls, information, and a status indicator. My vote for a new name would be "Track Control Panel", but that is the very name that set off this discussion in the first place. Also see my point below regarding Gale's survey.

On "Control" versus "Controls"... When I read "Track Control Panel" that says to me "a control panel for a track". When I read "Track Controls Panel" that says "a panel that has controls for a track". Both are acceptable, I suppose. It's just that personally I find "Track Controls Panel" awkward, but that apparently is just me.

FWIW, Mac does not have OS "control panels" - it has "preference panels" in the "System Preferences". So no confusion there between an Audacity "control panel" and a Mac "preference panel".

As for potential confusion with the "Control Toolbar", I've always wanted to re-name that the "Transport Toolbar" because a) it contains the transport controls and b) it would be consistent with the "Transport" menu. I don't care if it's called the "ControlToolbar" in the code, every other audio editor/DAW calls those buttons the transport controls.

Regarding Gale's survey, I am not convinced that renaming the Track Panel to "Track Control(s) Panel/Box/Area" will make any difference to how it is understood. That is another reason for wanting to leave it alone - IMO no matter what we name it we will still have as many users misunderstanding what it does.

As for the functions in the track drop-down menu - we do what we can. After emphasizing it again and again in the manual, many users apparently still overlook it.

A good point was made in the -quality thread ... we see here, and Gale sees on the feedback email, those who are having difficulty, are apparently not reading the manual, and are not comfortable exploring the GUI. This may skew our perceptions of how to document Audacity.

-- Bill

billw58 wrote: On "Control" versus "Controls"... When I read "Track Control Panel" that says to me "a control panel for a track". When I read "Track Controls Panel" that says "a panel that has controls for a track". Both are acceptable, I suppose. It's just that personally I find "Track Controls Panel" awkward, but that apparently is just me.

Not just you - I agree with those interpretations and also find "Track Control Panel" easier to say.
I also asked the person that suggested "Track Control Box", why they thought that would be a good name. The reply was "There are other controls, but the track controls are in that box". Logic that I find difficult to argue against.

waxcylinder wrote: So I for one would certainly vote for detaching the LDPBT from the track-name and making it grahically into a proper button. There are other LDPBTs in the Audacity GUI and all of those are clearly bottons (e.g. the two that are in the meter toolbar for the input and output meters). In this case the track-name could remain clickable but I would suggest that clicking on the trackname should just put the used into trackname edit mode to rename the track.

I'm not so sure that the entire rectangle does not look like a drop-down menu. Compare it to the device toolbar on Win7 http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... ce_Toolbar . Very similar IMO. Round the corners a bit and it's almost a dead ringer. So for our majority audience, I think it's fine the way it is. It's less fiddly to be able to click anywhere in the Name rectangle than to have to hit the LDPBT exactly.

Mac drop-down menus look very different http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... ar_mac.png , but we cope.

-- Bill

Thanks for the comments.

Two more votes: one for "Mixing Panel" (which makes it the "winner") and one for "Track Controls". Two of the people who voted for "Mixing Panel" gave reasons why they thought that was the best choice which ran along the lines that it was the *main* purpose of the Thing. One said I could quote him as "the last half of the dropdown menu can be seen as mixing too. Would be much simpler for less able people if you named the pieces of the window based on what it mainly does, and remove parts of it that don't do that to someplace else that mostly have those actions".

@ Steve - does your correspondent understand that the Thing has more controls than the sliders? Some of my correspondents who gave a similar rationale for a phrase including "Controls" do not understand that. One said it was like "the thing that controls the audio with the big buttons, but only for that track".

I added the votes about the Drop-Down Menu (TDDM) to Wiki Feature Requests. There are some interesting suggestions there about it.

My 2p is that clever as it is, too much was crammed into TDDM. I don't think having the triangle physically separated will help, because that would make it look even less like a combobox than it does now. If it really was a combo box (i.e. rounded corners as on Win, and the two triangles as on Mac) I think that would quite possibly help. One issue is of course the width.

---

The burning question - if we rename Track Panel and the choice was "Track Control Panel" or "Track Controls Panel", I'd come down for "Track Control Panel". I find if I'm describing the Windows Control Panel to a user and then have to go back to Audacity, I have to say "Audacity" anyway. I really don't like three words instead of two, and most people in the survey chose two words.

I agree with Bill a rename is unlikely to make people think the Thing is more than the sliders and possibly the Mute/Solo buttons. Indeed I think that even "Track Control Panel" is likely to make it worse. I think a generic phrase that fudges what is on the Thing is much better for our audience. Does anyone support "Track Box"?

Are we going to have some new element for the Manual that really is the "TrackPanel" class (the current "Track Panel", the vertical scale and Audio Track, plus the Timeline, background and scrollbars)? If so, do we call it "Track Panel"? These decisions are interlinked, we can't decide them in isolation.

I think we really can't have two things called "Panel" in the Manual that are not the same type of entity, so if TrackPanel becomes "<something> Panel", "Track Control Panel" is out of court. Equally I don't think we could move "Track Panel" in the Manual to mean the "TrackPanel" class. That would be terrible for backwards compatibility.



Gale

Gale Andrews wrote:Thanks for the comments.

Two more votes: one for "Mixing Panel" (which makes it the "winner") ...

I think we really can't have two things called "Panel" in the Manual that are not the same type of entity ...

Gale,
your second comment there kind of rules out Mixing Panel.

I would be against Mixing Panel anyway as that would introduce confusion with the Mixer Board
UPDATE: Oops, Gale I've just read your posting to the Wiki FR suggesting that "Mixer Board" should be renamed to "Multi-Meters" - this would avoid the confusion but not for a long while as you know feature requests can take a long time to get implemented. I would be aginst such a rename, as the "Mixer-Board" is much more than just a set of multi-meters, it carries a full set of mixing controls too (much like a hardware mixing board that many would be familiar with).

Maybe we should settle on the suggestion from Steve's techie: Track Control Box

I could certainly live with that.

==============================

I'm still not sure that we need to discuss TrackPanel in the manual (even with a more meaningful name). It is a concept that we have lived without in the user manual for a long time. As a concept it is mainly relevant to developers and rightly belongs in Functional Specifications (do we have those?) rather than user manuals.

WC