I know what I’m missing. I’m in Mac 1.3.7 and I’m flying through an edit session and suddenly realized I was taking many extra steps because I couldn’t tell how much of the show I had during a drag-select. I couldn’t select a point and drag to another point xx seconds earlier without doing painful math in my head. Quick, what’s 45 seconds back from 2:00:33?
I suppose this is a cousin to another complaint of mine that I can’t enter and manage absolute time either. Keystrokes: [- 1 3 0 0 0] backs up the cursor one and one half minutes (like it does on video editors).
Zoom so that you can see enough of the waveform. (45 seconds is a bit less than a minute, so if you can see “2:00:33” and “1:59:00” then that is near enough and not difficult).
Make sure that “Length” is selected on the Selection bar (rather than “End”).
Click on the track at “2:00:33” and drag to the left - watch the middle counter as you drag.
Zooming in for greater accuracy is easy if you have a wheel mouse (Ctrl+wheel).
Nobody knows modern Macs support three button mice with scroll wheel. I wouldn’t dream of running a Mac without one. Most of the machines are Microsoft Wireless, too, including the laptops. I can edit wheelies around people still trying to use one button. That’s just so 1980s.
Yes, I found it, but you’re still missing a time window since you can only have one at a time. One of my edited shows needs to know both numbers. Cut and move music precisely until the end comes out to…xxx.
My instinct says that you are right about this, but I don’t understand your example and I’m having trouble coming up with a practical situation where I am unable to achieve the desired result quite easily. Can you describe your “Cut and move” example in more detail.
The show has to come out 51:30. I want to delete half-second silences in the show until everything works out.
Alternately (and much more likely) I’m going to delete :30 clean chunks of the show. If the end doesn’t work out to 51:30, I know I made a mistake. Wait, 52:00??? I missed something !@#$%.
You can instantly check the length of the track (when “length” is selected) by double clicking on the track. To deselect, single click on the track.
You can move the cursor position by text entry into the “Selection Start” box. (this will usually be the start point of your desired selection).
You can set the end point of your selection by text entry into the middle selection box - either as the absolute time (“End” selected) or the duration of the selection (“Length” selected).
The thing Audacity cannot do is to type in time of the end of the selection, and the length of the selection. When might I need to do that?
Does Audacity need to have another time entry box? (“Length” and “End” as separate boxes rather than combined?)
There is no box on video editors. Any time in the middle of cutting and editing your brains out, you can type + 1 0 0 0 0 [enter] and the cursor will leap forward one minute (Minutes, Seconds, Frames). It’s sort of a hotkey. Tell me you wouldn’t find that handy – and fast. Particularly if you have a keyboard with a keypad.
Yes I can see that being useful.
I presume that -10000 makes the cursor jump back 1 minute.
A couple of things though - Audacity can use different frame rates, or milliseconds, so would it be linked to the current setting?
The “1” key is already a hot key (but not on the numeric keypad, at least not on my machine).
I presume that the cursor jumps when you press “Enter”? But “Enter” is also a hot key.
Would you want “Shift+Enter” to select from the current cursor position to the new position?
There is a posting up the forum where somebody wants to select exactly the same edit points in, for example, 16 tracks. I don’t know how he’s going to do that without a lot of coffee and mousing. I don’t know any way to do that across multiple tracks which was the original question. In a video editor, you can set the first edit the hard way and using those time numbers, blast to each point on each track. [+ the first offset] ^B, Home, [+ the second offset] ^B. Repeat for each track.
This is assuming your editor will not let you bulk select tracks…
Once you have sticky labels posted, the rest should be pretty easy.
The words “SET IN and SET OUT” edit points keep forcing themselves past my lips. ^B Labels are a make-do until the real edit point manager comes along.
Ctrl+A to select All
then type the start and end positions into the selection boxes.
If you wanted to select the same part on all tracks Except for, say, track number 13, you would do the above then scroll so that you can see track 13 and Shift+click below the track name. (that toggles the track selection on/off).
If you want to adjust the selection with the mouse, hold the shift key down and click+drag whichever end of the selection you want to adjust.
To make the same selection on say tracks 3, 4, 5 and 6 - make the selection on track 3, then Shift+down to extend the selection to the track below (down, down, down).
You can select individual tracks by using the up/down keys then press ENTER to toggle the track selection.
I would like to see a keyboard way of moving tracks up and down. Dragging tracks with the mouse is OK if there are only a few tracks, but when there are a lot of tracks it is a pain because only a few tracks will fit on the screen at one time
