when you open Kdenlive the tracks by default are:
Video 3
video 2
Video 1
Audio 1
Audio 2
This seems wrong to me and I don't understand why and I want it to start at Video 1 at the top i.e:
Video 1
Video 2
Video 3
Audio 1
Audio 2
How do you set it to this as default?

Interesting opinion. It is important to know that the order of the tracks has changed over the years: then, today. Interesting because you assume the basic montage has to happen in conjunction with several video tracks. However, programmers are free to choose how they implement "user-friendly", see for example Magix.

The order of the tracks in the different editors is sometimes ascending, sometimes descending. The standard effects and transitions are set up accordingly. A possible explanation could be constructed from the traditional cut where the new film strip was glued onto the previous one (we don't pay attention to the audio tracks).

As long as the tracks can be pushed up and down afterwards - which unfortunately is still not possible …

When I think back to the times when the track naming and order has been diskussed, I remenber the following reason for the order we have today: Correct numbering when splitting video and audio plus a certain track logic.

If you start in track Video 1 and split video and audio, audio will be in audio 1. A clip to be combined with it goes to Video 2 and its' split audio goes to audio 2 (assuming audio 1 is filled). Thus you have the same track number for video and audio that belong together.

Why did they not use the same numbering thing for
video 1
video 2
audio 1
audio 2?

Because the experts (using also professional NLEs) and others found it easier to visually combine video and audio tracks having the same distance from the middle of all tracks (which is between Video 1 and Audio 1).

If you don't like the order, you can rename it. If you do many videos, you may want to create an empty template with tracks names as you like them.

capslock wrote:Because the experts (using also professional NLEs) and others found it easier to visually combine video and audio tracks having the same distance from the middle of all tracks (which is between Video 1 and Audio 1).

So that's why! And I was wondering why the audio channels can't be separated. Let's hope it stays that way, so that the experts don't lose track of everything!1

It seems that they have altered the order (I am presuming the order was different in earlier versions as it looks this way in the manual and YouTube tutorials) to cater for for some experts forgetting every one would not be happy with it preferring instead a logical order. It is 2018 I am no expert in programming but I would have thought it would not be too difficult to make this a configuring setting within the settings menu. Then you could make the default be the way YOU want not some experts somewhere.
So I hope whoever programmes this takes note and makes the improvement in future versions.
In the mean time I will just have to keep altering it manually every time I start a new project!