Non-destructive audio editing in playlist + fast move cntrl

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zircon
Sat Nov 17, 2007 4:35 pm

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Non-destructive audio editing in playlist + fast move cntrl

One feature that FL sorely lacks is a specific subset of standard audio editing functionality of programs like Logic and Pro Tools. In these programs (and many others) you can make non-destructive edits of audio in the track arrangement window. For example, say a vocal is 9.5 measures long. You can right click and drag the right end of the vocal waveform and reduce it to 8 measures to see how it would sound without the last few words. If you don't like it, you can simply drag the right edge back out no problem. In FL, dragging from the right timestretches the audio, which is something I might want to do, but I feel is definitely not something that you would prominently use as opposed to cropping audio.

That said, if you want to crop audio in FL, you must switch tools, lop off whatever part of the wave you don't want, and then get rid of the remainder audio. Now you've made a destructive edit. There's no easy way to get that tail back unless you reload the waveform entirely OR if you simply kept it and shunted it to some other part of the playlist. Neither of which are nearly as efficient as simply dragging the waveform back out.

It would be great if FL allowed you to do the sort of non-destructive editing I'm talking about in as little effort as other programs allow you to do it. I find myself constantly wanting this functionality, especially when working on anything with lots of longer audio clips being used that may not be perfectly formatted the way I want. EG. Maybe if you hold ALT or SHIFT along with left clicking and dragging from the right, it enables the crop/extend function, and if you don't, it timestretches. Of course, this feature can (and should) be applied to dragging from the left edge as well!

This way, you don't abandon the existing functionality while still adding something new and highly accessible.

The slip edit tool is a step in the right direction, but not as flexible as what I'm talking about, and requires you to change tools to access it.

Additionally, I think it would be very useful, given FL's loop-based nature, to implement a keyboard shortcut that nudges to the next or previous beat OR next/previous measure. EG. the < and > keys nudge by measure, and [ and ] nudge to beat. Of course, this would only work if typing keyboard->piano is off. However, it would be very useful for not only navigating the playlist quickly, but for live performance as well.

gol
Sat Nov 17, 2007 4:49 pm

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There's no easy way to get that tail back unles...

zircon
Sat Nov 17, 2007 5:02 pm

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With regards to the "Full" function, it does wo...

gol
Sat Nov 17, 2007 6:27 pm

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it's all in the latest beta

zircon
Sun Nov 18, 2007 8:50 pm

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Sick! Didn't realize the slip tool worked like ...

altf13
Wed Nov 21, 2007 1:22 am

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The slip tool is killer. It was absolutely miss...


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