This might be of your interest to see  how music production software solved the UI for many controls and options the user might want to control at the same (real!) time.   SONAR X1 actually haven’t brought any new functionality in this new version, just completely redesigned UI and build on top of this marketing campaign. Another fact I like is that they haven’t use all these fancy styles on windows that makes things look ‘nice’ like powerpoint but are not well readable or effective for eyes. To me it is kind of mixture of VisualStudio 2010 UI plus Office Ribbon bar plus good color scheme and additional tweaks to make it really usable.

watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97LnrViar38