Some top-line thoughts to begin with
I am absolutely blown away by the technology that is behind Phoenix! The DVOs are generally incredibly powerful and can make very tedious tasks a breeze, but...
by the same token, when it comes to usability, Phoenix is a hot mess! Oftentimes, it does not follow established UX/UI idioms, amking it unnecessarily cumbersome and unintuitive. I've spent hours searching for a feature that should be absolutely trivial - such as copying and pasting a segment from one track into others - only to find it is hidden somewhere completely obscure and follows a methodology that makes no sense to a real-life user.
As time allows, I will try to point out some of the biggest offerenders, in my opinion, and I hope you will be able to take the feedback to heart and, perhaps, improve the user experience over time.
One of the biggest gripes I have, though, is the lack of proper hardware support.
For an application that is 99% reliant on the CPU, why is there no MacOS version? I can understand that games don't support MacOS because of their reliance on GPUs and things like CUDA, in an ecosystem where an app has to be cross-platform compatible and work ona numerous competing graphics processors and technologies. For an app that is entriely dsriven by raw CPU power, it is inexcusable in my opinion, not to support the powerful MacOS platform which sits on virtually every professional's desk.
Especially with Apple's silicon, Macs outperform any other processor money can buy. So, please, would you consider a MacOS version?
Having said that, though, why is Phoenix so reliant on CPU and not the GPU? From a software engineering standpoint, it seems you are missing out on the most powerful part of any modern PC. Running filters and processes on 500 CUDA cores in parallel beats even the fastest 24-core i9-13900K processor any day of the week by an order of magnitude. From what I can tell - looking from the outside in, admittedly - the kinds of transformations DVOs perform are tailor-made for parallel processing and resemble the kinds of DSP processes that CUDA cores are designed and optimized for. So, I can't figure out, why I constantly have to wait while my i9 processor tries to play catch-up.
As I said, I will try to set aside some time here and there to post more suggestions, more specific to certain situations, DVOs and the UX/UI handling.
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Hi there,
Firstly, thanks for taking the time to write up the feedback, it is appreciated.
I would be keen to dig into this a little further with you, would you have time to jump on a quick call to discuss the points raised? We can also give you an overview of what we're doing to make the DVO tools more accessible.
There are two main points to this,
The introduction of Loki 2.0.
The current development to support the Apple M-Series Processors for our OFX DVOs.
Thanks
Ian