Hmm the more we discuss it, the more difficult it gets in my view.
I’m only a casual Ardour/Mixbus user these days, I more or less always use slide mode, typically working on rather small sessions with only a few tracks (up to a dozen maybe) and not too many regions which I often combine as soon as I’m done with edits, and I usually select the regions I want to move together, or use middle click to stay in position and change track, I don’t see benefit in changing mode for these operations.
Regarding naming, my main problem is that I cannot mentally connect the meaning of “ripple” (wellen, kräuseln etc.) with what it does. “Wogen” even less meets that meaning for me, that evokes images of huge oceanic waves in slow motion… it seems that’s less of an issue for you english native speakers.
From my user experience I’d be inclined to rename these modes completely: “free” or “floating” for slide, “chained” “horizontal” or “remainder together” for ripple, and someting like “vertical” or “cross-track” for lock.
That’s before even thinking how those would fit into that pop-up menu or with which decent translation for these new terms I could come up with.
I like them but “ripple” edit is basically an industry-standard term at this point. For me the term “ripple” is also an apt description because it is about an action spreading through the rest of the project (a little like in English when we say a “ripple of laughter” i.e. laughter spreading through a crowd of people).
Even if one can derive it from the discussion above, I was not aware of the fact that this term is so widely used.
Well, how about leaving these three mode names untranslated? German Cakewalk documentation consistently talks about “die Ripple-Edit-Funktion” or “Beim Ripple-Editing von Clips…”
I’ve made a patch to rename all edit modes to their english original. It should apply against current git master https://paste.opensuse.org/41242704. I’ve told Robin about it and wait for him to apply it upstream, or continue discussion, but I think we have reached consensus?
All in all I still feel slightly uncomfortable with this (non-)solution, not being able to come up with sensible german terms… OTOH it’s just a fact that in german sound engineering lingo lots of original english terms are commonly used and understood.
To get back to the original theme - I find it very strange that there is a function that does exactly what I am afraid of from the first to the last second of the whole project, namely that tracks slip against each other. I can’t even imagine what Ripple is supposed to be good for?
What did I do to avoid the slipping - maybe it can be useful for other users:
I invested in a new cable mouse - BenQ ZOWIE EC2 - it lies much better in my relatively large hand as my bluetooth-mouse and therefore slips less when clicking. Its a bit nasty with the cable, but turning off bluetooth is above all in public space (eg. train) a security issue - https://francozappa.github.io/about-bias/
Also, I’ve stopped clicking on tracks directly, I always come from the side. If this was not possible, I always switched to lock mode before.
Furthermore, the separation into “rough” cutting - always in group mode - and then doing the fine cutting in a further step has proved to be very useful. I only had to take different parts twice in the whole project because I didn’t get rid of the crackles despite the fine cutting (the track with the most regions has 815 - so a lot of cuts).
Still a mystery to me after 7 of 8 CDs: when I lose the group function, but this is a topic for another thread.
There are many many different workflows, tasks and ways to tackle things in a DAW.
Just one example from my side:
For example I use it to edit recordings of myself playing guitar or baroque lute solo pieces. I’m not a master virtuoso player, so I regularly make mistakes both in plucking and in timing. The music is constantly changing tempo, using rubato and In that case I keep recording and repeat the passage until I think it fits for cutting, and edit out the mistakes afterwards. Often I repeat that editing procedure months or years later, for minor timing or playing mistakes that escaped my attention previously, replacing a not so good passage with a better snippet from another repetition of the same music, or removing a fraction of a second here or there.
In my view in such situations ripple edit could be very useful, even if I prefer to stay in slide mode and shift select the remaining regions on that track. When I’m sure to be happy with my editing, I use “Combine regions” to minimize the risk of editing mistakes in the future.
But that’s the total opposite of a situation where you work on multiple tracks that need to stay in sync to each other… which I also do from time to time, e.g. editing Video or Audio soundtracks similar to what you are doing. Besides making music as a hobby, I’m sound and light technician since the 1980’s and have developed a sense of being aware of the constant risk of editing mistakes. Therefore I spend a lot of concentration on checking and noticing unintended horizontal movements and such. Also undo/redo, frequent session saves, snapshots and autosave are really important in that regard.
Ripple mode is handy when you edit a radio program and want to delete parts of the audio (mistakes, parts of a interview that you don’t want to include in the final product, etc). Ripple automatically removes the empty space left over the deleted part. Without ripple you would have to manually slide regions earlier after every cut.
To cut a long story short ripple - mode is used everywhere where audio playback is not tied to tempo or synced to video.
As @mhartzel mentioned, anytime you are editing dialog ripple mode is incredibly useful. Audiobooks, etc. especially, as many VO actors or readers will just go back and redo a line when they weren’t happy with it automatically, very useful to close those up in that case.