How to preview cuts

is it possible to make a selection and then play a short time before the selection and a short time after the selection. in other words: play all exept the selection but not really all, only to hear, if the selected audio can be cutted out. this is for broadcast productions very usefull and known there as ‘cut preview’.

in audacity 1.3.7. this functions exists (hold ctrl and click play).

Interesting and useful idea.

On the other hand, we have unlimited undo/redo, so it you don’t like a cut, ctrl-z will get you back to before you made it. Even so, it would be worth filing this in the bug tracker as a feature request.

Thank you.
Yes, with undo/redo its possible. But a common task in broadcast productions is cutting slips from records of an hour or more and with the help of a specifically feature for this you’ll be much faster.

So i have create a feature request.

btw, ardour is a really shock for me and unique in the *nix world.
finally a program which is comparable with steinberg wavelab and the others in the win/mac world. Great!

I would like to emphasize what stemuedendron wrote – I just would like to add another point about a feature which is very useful in radio broadcasting work: When I do a cut in a DAW software like Magix Samplitude, Samplitude automatically generates - first - a short overlap of about 35 ms between the two clips (without moving one of them against the other) and - second - a short “automatic cross fade” of this duration in the overlapping area between both clips. (Automatic cross fade in general and its duration are adjustable.)
The result is a nice smooth cut, extremely useful if you have to cut (for example) clips from interviews which were recorded in acoustically “unfriendly” :wink: (reverberating) rooms.
As Samplitude developers say, they got their inspiration from the kind of cuts you do when you cut and glue a real ¼” magnetic tape using a knife that cuts the tape in a diagonal way so that both tape clips overlap for about half a centimetre or so.

It would be fine if it was possible to add this feature to Ardour also :slight_smile: I guess this would Ardour make an even more interesting software especially for radio broadcasting use. I know that many of my radio colleagues are looking for a capable and good sounding DAW software

However, I’m rather new to Ardour but I’m really impressed to learn how professional this DAW software is. I guess it has similar capabilities like 500- to 1.000-€-software which is for Windows. Congratulations to all developing engineers :slight_smile: you have done a great job.

Michael

The problem with this kind of “feature” is that it can’t work all the time, and in the instances where it does work, I believe that Ardour’s current method of handling things is actually better than what you’re used to in Samplitude.

If you place one region over another region so that its ends are entirely contained by “lower” region, then short automatic xfades are created at the ends to avoid any audio issues there. You can adjust the length of these short xfades in the Preferences dialog (the default is 15 msec).

If you place one region over another region so that just one end overlaps, then Ardour will create either a “long” or a “short” xfade depending on your current preferences. A long xfade will span the entire overlap, a short overlap will occur just at the start of the overlap and is the same length as the short automatic xfade mentioned above. You can edit “long” xfades in a custom dialog that allows almost infinite control over their shape(s).

Finally, if you butt two regions up against each other, they already have built-in fade in/fade out curves at each end which will avoid audio glitches in almost all cases (there are always pathological cases that can mess up xfades no matter how they are done).

Glad to hear you find Ardour impressive.

Stemuedendron and mk1967 - Ben Loftis and I once started a sophisticated edit dialog that would allow you to preview edits and also add crossfades (even assymetric crossfades). It kinda got lost when some more important requirements came up but I believe the code is still lurking there somewhere. Can’t remember how you get the dialog to appear though… :frowning:

@paul: I suspect the problem isn’t so much the cut/undo itself … this is trivial using the range tool. The tricky part is to allow auditioning with the fewest mouse clicks. A key binding to “play range with pre/post roll” inside the main editor would be nice. (the crossfade dialog already has one)

John and I were working on an “assembly edit” dialog that allows faster broadcast-style editing. We thought this might be better than trying to crowbar these features into the main editor via lots of options and modes. It didn’t support more than one track at a time, but it was really fast for dialog editing. Unfortunately we didn’t implement exactly the original poster’s request. But we were pretty close.

@JohnE: We never checked the code into svn, it’s a patch. It is a separate dialog with minimal changes to Ardour code, so it probably builds with minimal changes against A3.

Code is available for anyone who would like to try it out, but it really needs to be rethought as a complete “track editor” rather than the “crossfade editor” which is where I started from.

-Ben Loftis

Thank you for your fast replies :slight_smile:

@Paul: I’ve begun (and will continue) to check out especially your last advice. Sounds interesting and actually seems to work in a lot of cases.

Michael

Actually Paul’s advice “If you place one region over another region so that just one end overlaps, then Ardour will create either a “long” or a “short” xfade” works well. I’ve tried to do so on some radio occasions meanwhile, and after you get a bit practice it’s rather comfortable :-).

Michael