I have always wanted the ability to annotate clips with various things, that travel with the clip (ignoring all the special cases for now). ^There are several ways to do this - but I am not sure anything is on the roadmap even distant ones.
In the interim I stumbled upon Pure Ref - a freeware / shareware and I am exploring its capabilities.
https://www.pureref.com/ for download, documentation, quick tutorial videos.
If anyone is already using it with Audacity I am eager to know.
It has lot of general capabilities for its design center and I am trying to see how I can leverage it.
Here are its strengths.
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I can create an Overlay /Canvas with full sizing and moving capabilities.
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I can set the transparency of the canvas so I see the windows below it. I can choose Color for the Canvas.
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I can pass all the mouse events to the windows below ******* - and turn it off as needed for doing operations on the canvas.
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I can add text, images, draw on the Canvas - ****** powerful. There are tons of capabilities for artistic work here.
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I can add as many Canvas as I need *****
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I wish I can lock the Canvas to the Underlying App Window – that would be too nice and exceptional. But cannot do it right now. There are lot of requirements/design behavior issues here, obvisouly.
How I am using it for now. See the screen shot below. The two red vertical rectangles are Pure Ref Canvas. I am using them to mark the positions of interest in the top and bottom clips - The green highlights. Note: These rectangles and highlights are NOT locked to Audacity. They are STATIC on the desktop.
All Mouse events are passed onto Audacity.
You can also see the cursor line - which is free for whatever I want to do.
A typical operation is getting the green position on the top clip aligned with the green position on the bottom clip.
Unfortunately there is no Audacity Operation to Select the Cursor on a Clip and Drag it and the Clip moves. An important feature that is needed.
For now I use Split, Move, Join to accomplish alignments. My recall is that STEVE (I hope he is reading this) created a Nyquist Macro for doing this as a single operation 2-3 years ago.
Look forward to hearing from you. I also hope people play with these and generate ideas for Audacity roadmaps.
Audacity UI has still got a lot of ways to go forward, to ease the tedium and accomplishing reliable precise complex operations.
regards Sri.
