Pardon me if this has already been suggested (although I could not find it here or in the wiki…)
I suggest a ‘lock’ checkbox be added to the Beats Per Minute section (and possibly the Lengths (seconds) section) for the ‘to’ boxes.
This would save time when doing multiple different tempo changes in a track of music that is frequently off the beat (or click track)
I have been remastering old piano recordings, and the pianist has inadvertently sped up and slowed down unintentionally. (Okay, I was the pianist, too, so I’m sure of this!)
As I have been manually ‘quantizing’ the track to match the original tempo, I often have to add a faster or slower “From” time, but always add the same “To” time. It has become tedious to constantly add the same ‘To’ Tempo, since the dialog box automatically adjusts the ‘To’ based on the current ‘Percent change’ and the latest ‘From’ entry.
With a ‘lock’, the ‘To’ value could be entered once, and entering different ‘From’ values each time would not change the ‘To’ value.
OK, got it. The problem that I see with that, is that it would then be very easy to overflow the maximum possible amount of stretching. (The Change Tempo effect has a maximum range of -99% to +400%).
Example:
If you selected a 3 minute track and stretched it to 3m 10 seconds, that’s about -5.26% change.
If the length was “locked” (as suggested) and you then selected a single note of say 0.5 seconds, then the percent change would be -99.7% which is out of range.
Similarly (the other way round), if you first stretched a single note by say +5%, and then selected a whole track, then the stretch percentage would be huge.
You could copy and paste the “to” length value (Ctrl+C to copy, Ctrl+V to paste). I know that’s not perfect for your use case, but probably quicker than typing.
(And how did I miss that typo in the original title! Ugh!)
I didn’t know that the suggestion (if implemented as stated) could lead to an error situation. However, I’m wondering if there is some error detection that could lead to an error dialog box as seen in several other filters? This could avoid the limit problem from taking place if so.
Is there a way to just introduce a lock to the Beats Per Minute and NOT lock the length? I don’t see how locking the Beats per Minute would cause the problem you describe, unless the length was locked, too.
In the situation I am describing, the key help would be to ONLY lock the “To” section of the Beats per Minute, as that is the value that is staying the same in all of the edits on the track. I am not making tempo changes by Length or percentage - those numbers automatically change as I change the Beats. And doing a longer section (or whole track) vs. just a note - the “to” beats per minute is always going to be the same, and the ‘from’ beats per minute doesn’t change so dramatically as to make any of the other readings get anywhere close to the limit of the effect.
Still, if an error dialog could be generated if a user DID end up trying to force changes outside the limits, that should still be effective, no?
This doesn’t seem to work (at least on a Mac.) When I try to Command-C (the copy command on a Mac), the Change Tempo dialog box instantly closes! I don’t understand why this is, but it is. So, every time I use the dialog box, if I am making a different tempo change than I did the last time, I have to manually enter the “To” beats by selecting the whole field, then typing the same number as before… over and over!
By the way, is there a way to edit your own post title after it has been submitted? I would love to have this thread say “Suggestion” instead of “Suggestiong”
I just saw that Audacity had a new update released today. So I downloaded it, and noticed that there appeared to be a bug fix regarding dialog boxes NOT closing (and thus not putting the filter effect into effect at that point) when using the enter key.
Well, at least in the Change tempo dialog box, the Enter key still has no effect.
(And using Mac’s Full Keyboard Access could open up just as many can of worms, as it requires me to tab to the correct button. If I tab to 'Cancel" instead, and hit return, it seems to act as I hit the ‘Enter’ button instead!)
Also, even with the update, I still can’t use Command-C to copy the ‘To’ beats per minute value in the Change Tempo dialog box. Still closes the window instead.
And I did verify that I do not have any other keyboard shortcuts set to Command C in Audacity or in Mac Keyboard shortcuts preference.
Should this/these issues be posted to the bug list, or are they already known?
I saw the release notes, and I’m confused about whether the Enter key dialog box issue was meant to be fixed, or if that is still a known problem for the next go-round to tackle.
