Really want to switch from Audition. Following would help:

[Jonatello]

This being my first ever post, I should start by commending everyone involved on such a promising program, one which has steadily improved over time.

I’m really wanting and trying to vanquish my reliance on proprietary software, such as windows. My new powerful laptop is 100% linux. I really want to make music with it. Over the years I’ve developed a workflow for myself on windows using FL Studio and Adobe Audition. It looks like the entire open source universe i pointing ex Audition users to Audacity, and for good reason. With the way some of us use Audition, however, this can be pretty painful.

For me, the big wish is related to multitrack sample manipulation (i’m basing this on my workflow):

I would like to see a more intuitive and flexible ability to chop up waveforms into pieces and move/manipulate those pieces (snapping and non-snapping) all over the multitrack timeline, with no awkward restriction, just dragging stuff around with either a right or left click-drag (maybe a single left-click on a particular piece in a particular track initiates the dragging highlighting of that particular piece, while a double-left-click highlights piece as a whole – right-click could give a menu, while right-click-drag could move it around).

Then comes the ability to highlight specific pieces/chunks (and sections of the pieces) together, right-click on an empty track and choose “mix down selection to track”, thus creating a new wave chunk which represents the chopping and arranging I was doing.

Then finally comes the ability to take that particular chunk/piece, right click “duplicate”, get a box asking how many (let’s say 7), and now the piece is repeating itself 7 times along the same track (not 7 new tracks with one copy on each), thus creating a repeating musical pattern.

Also, this whole process is greatly facilitated by the presence of a “loop play” button in the playback control. I can highlight a section of a particular wave chunk and preview that as a loop, so I can figure out exactly where I’d want to split it.

I hope this is kind of workflow can be made feasible to the open source world soon

[steve]

Most of these features are available in Audacity 1.3.13, though the exact details may be a bit different from Adobe Audition.

@Jonatello

chop up waveforms into pieces

Select the section (click and drag) that you want to split as a separate audio clip and press Ctrl+I (or “Edit menu > Clip Boundaries > Split”).

@Jonatello

and move/manipulate those pieces (snapping and non-snapping) all over the multitrack timeline,

Select the “Time Shift Tool” (F5 key or double headed arrow button <–>), then click and drag the clip. The only restrictions are that the audio clips have the same number of channels as the destination track (mono or stereo) and that there is room for the clip (you can’t drag an audio clip into a space that is too small for the audio clip).
Use F1 key to change back to the normal selection key.

“Right click” is not currently implemented in Audacity - I believe there is some problem in getting right click to work on Mac computers for programs that use WxWidgets (which Audacity uses for its GUI).

@Jonatello

highlight specific pieces/chunks (and sections of the pieces) together, right-click on an empty track and choose “mix down selection to track”, thus creating a new wave chunk which represents the chopping and arranging I was doing.

To do this without limitation, duplicate sections that you want included in the mix onto new mono/stereo tracks as appropriate. Use as many tracks as is necessary to accommodate any overlapping audio clips. The idea of this step is to create tracks that contain only audio that is to be included in the track - If all of the audio in one or more tracks is to be included, then there is no need to duplicate those tracks.

Then select all of the tracks that contain the audio that is to be included (use the up/down keys to move focus from one track to another and use the Enter key to select/de-select that track).

Then press Ctrl+Shift+M to render all selected tracks to a new track.

@Jonatello

right click “duplicate”, get a box asking how many (let’s say 7), and now the piece is repeating itself 7 times along the same track (not 7 new tracks with one copy on each), thus creating a repeating musical pattern.

Left click and drag to make the selection, then “Effect Menu > Repeat”.

@Jonatello

Also, this whole process is greatly facilitated by the presence of a “loop play” button in the playback control. I can highlight a section of a particular wave chunk and preview that as a loop, so I can figure out exactly where I’d want to split it.

Make the selection then press “Shift + Space” (or hold the shift key down while you click on the Play button).

All of these features are covered in the Audacity documentation:
Audacity wiki: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Audacity_Wiki_Home_Page
Audacity 1.3 manual: http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page (also available in the “Help” menu of Audacity).

[kozikowski]

You’re still going to get killed with money-based features. Audition and Cool Edit before it had a paid Fraunhofer license and would generate MP3 straight away. Same with Multi-Channel ASIO support. My older copy of Audition had direct support for MIDI management. You can get the first two with additional software and recompiling Audacity. The last eludes us.

Koz