I also struggled a couple of days ago finishing of a CD project (and yes, I still create CDs regularly; my clients (often not too old) and also me personally, love getting a finished physical product in their hands as a real result of a cool project… I don’t know, maybe Austria is lagging behind or you can call me old-school… ):
I had to alter the CD master several times (changing track order, adjusting fades and “gaps”…) and therefore also had to move the markers… Was a big hassle to get everything back where we wanted it again…
What would have been really helpful and could serve as a first step to a bigger solution (and is also possible in other DAWs): Could we make markers draggable together with audio regions? At the moment this seems to be impossible - while you can have groups of markers and audio regions selected at the same time, dragging on the timeline moves only one or the other, but never both together… Could this be implemented? (And also the option to select regions and markers together “in one click” (mouse-drag selection-area) would appeal to my workflow often, too…)
Exactly. As discussed above, this would be mainly achieved with “ripple all tracks” feature which is standard in REAPER, Samplitude, Sequoia, Pyramix and others.
With regards your won proposed solution, yes, dragging a marker(perhaps ctrl-dragging?) could/should move all subsequent markers and ctrl-shift-dragging could move both subsequent markers and regions.
So, that’s two feature discussions:
Traditional “ripple all tracks and markers” by click-dragging on a single region, and,
click-dragging (perhaps with modifier) directly on a marker to ripple markers alone or markers + regions (most useful).
Obviously 1) is critical but I can also see a good use case for 2) which is a CD marker set just before a region. If you want to maintain the “gap” between marker and region ctrl-shift-dragging marker to the right would keep that gap versus using method 1) that would open up said gap.
Again: global markers do not have any inherent relationship with regions. Imagine that you have a session even with just two tracks and you are moving regions around in one track but not the other. Do global markers move? Why would they?
That said, I do agree that a “ripple everything” option when editing highly correlated material is clearly desirable. If you are working on material where you are frequently doing ripple editing, this makes perfect sense.
I do understand that there (currently) is no relationship between markers and regions. And I agree that there doesn’t have to be one in many situations!
But also without relationship, being able to drag markers as part of a bigger selection together with audio regions, doesn’t seem abstruse to me…?
I think it is very common to use range markers for defining the start and end of tracks (be it within a CD mastering project or an individual project for just one song), and have the range marker start before the first audio region starts…
When we now think of non-global markers with inherent relationship to audio regions: Wouldn’t it be thinkable to have the related marker start at a negative time value in relation to the audio region?
This might be the case for Ardour users but elsewhere CD markers (for an actual CD or digital release) are still the way most album engineers work. When creating DDPs, CD markers are essential (not too bothered about missing pause markers as they seem to be going out of fashion). In a live classical album for instance, there is generally no absolute silence with room tone filling the gaps. Ensuring adjoining ranges seems like a bit of a nuisance in that scenario. Also note that CD markers ensure placement on actual CD frames.
Yes, absolutely but you will not be able to create them in any particularly easy way. If you put a region/cue marker in place, the trim the right side of the region so that it starts later than the marker (or the left side so that the region ends earlier than the marker), then there is effectively a region/cue marker outside the region. But you won’t be able to see it, and you won’t be able to place a new one outside the region either (at least, not reliably, since there may be no corresponding part of a source file to attach it to, and you can’t see where the source boundaries are unless they correspond precisely with the region.
Now, you might say “why not ust associate these markers with regions, not source files?” The reason is that the markers are intended to be referencing specific audio/MIDI data, and the only way to refer to that unambigously is as a position within the source file.
If you have an audio/MIDI file that is 1 minute long, and you have a marker 30 seconds in, and a region that spans from 0m15s to 0m45s, then the marker is in the middle of the region. If you now trim the region so that the start is at 30 seconds, the marker is at the start of the region, as it should be because it corresponds to the audio/MIDI data 30 seconds into the audio/MIDI file.
Region boundaries are subject to change; source files boundaries are not. Region/cue markers do not reference some time relative to the start of the region, they reference some absolute point within the underlying data. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t consistently reference anything at all, except “15 seconds into the region”, which isn’t of much use to anyone.
That’s why these markers need to be associated with source files, not regions, and that’s why it will be hard to place them outside of a region.
I never had any problems with range markers for DDP production. Actually (just checked), Ardour’s CUE and TOC files are identical, whether you use CD track markers or CD range markers! In mastering projects I generally use snap to CD-frames as a habit, so that’s no problem either… (And I admit that I still use the two-second-gap before each track often… )
Of course, when you need gapless playback (e.g. longer live recordings), single track markers seem more useful, and in this case I used them too…
One point though, why I generally prefer range markers lately: That way I can export not only the whole mastered CD, but also the single tracks in multiple formats, automatically in one go… I wouldn’t know how to do that without range markers?
Paul, thank you very much for your in-depth clarification! Your statements are very reasonable - and I generally trust your judgement more than mine.
Of course there are many use cases and countless workflows and we won’t find an optimal solution for every single user… I just looked at my last CD mastering project again and there region markers could have made my life easier (mainly for moving them together with regions, as mentioned before). But they would definitely have had to extend beyond the region boundaries, e.g. for adding a little silence before or after a track… So in that very case I cannot really agree to:
So maybe my workflow is strange to begin with ; or in this case we would need another kind of marker that is somehow related to a region (and moves with it), but with the option to extend beyond the region’s boundaries on both ends (and obviously still be visible)…
I assume what is discussed here is what is found via Region > Markers > Add Region Cue Marker (default shortcut M). It is a very useful feature to me, thanks a lot! But it still could improve:
My use case is I do telephone interviews. While recording I use the NUMPAD ENTER to add marks on the fly at spots I know I’ll have to edit afterwards. Now if either of these two were possible it would be awsesome:
Post recording: Select desired region > select markings > "convert to Region Cue Marker(s)
or
Pre recording: Some setting > Enable Region Cue Marker while recording
If 2. is the best way, the region cue marker is a bit slow since it requires to type a name - an option to have marks automatically named “Cue 1, Cue 2”, etc would also be great.
Is my wording understandable? If it’s clear enough I can add a feature request, unless the option is already present and I missed it (which is not unlikely on my part).
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