Lishy im still not sure how a waveform, in the absence of regions, can tell you where you are in a song or when a solo is coming up at a glance?
You also said you sometimes use the regions to get a visual reminder so what’s the difference?
Not trying to be difficult just trying to understand that’s all.
While I'm not a big 'user' of the Waveform for any specific purpose, I did discover that my singer was using it as a visual guide for where a song with, say, a longer quiter intro would have the band come in (indicated by almost nothing on waveform to a big block) and stuff like that. In my case, it was quite unintentional.
The other use for the Waveform that I have is when at rehearsal we're just skipping through parts of songs. I can look at the waveform and have a pretty good idea of different parts of the song based on the dynamic of the backing track. This just makes the scenario of "let's just jump to the Bridge and practice that transition" a bit easier.
Neither of these are deal breakers, or even major issues, if the waveform didn't exist for me.
I find creating Audio Regions quite time consuming on an iPad (it would be easier on a Mac I suspect). I don't use Logic so can't use the exported Markers feature that ST recognises. I don't need audio regions for jumping around songs (other than the above rehearsal scenario), or looping parts of songs. That is not what my bands do (but I appreciate other users see it as a critical feature). Also, being in a band with all the band members connecting to our ST3 Host, Audio Regions are not transimitted to the Clients, so no reason for me to consider using them as a visual guide to song structure (until ST4 🙂 )
Like you, I use clicks and cues going into my IEMs so the visual cues on ST are not important to me. In fact, from a stagecraft perspective, I'd say anything that gives you a reason to look at an iPad is not good as it means you aren't engaging the audience and other band members. That said, I'm not getting any younger and appreciate the 'safety net' of ST on the iPad for lyrics (which I timestamp) and other visual cues as the brain seems to struggle to retain more recent info! The disclipine I find is to not rely on the 'crutch' and actually make an effort to NOT look at the iPad unless absolutely necessary (we all have brain explosions, moments of brainfade/distraction, etc.).
Now that ST4 transmit the Audio Region info from Host to Client in a Network Sessions setup, I'll be running this new feature by my bandmates and asking them whether they see this as useful, or a distraction we can live without. I'm kinda hoping the latter so I don't have to go back and spend time creating Audio Regions on the 50+ current songs we're doing (let alone the entire repertoire of 200+ songs)!