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Old 05-08-2012, 05:51 AM   #1
visa tapani
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Mar 2012
Posts: 21
Default Selecting envelope points across multiple lanes

Vote on ticket at issue tracker here: http://forum.cockos.com/project.php?issueid=4137
Some previous discussion: http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=73435

Reaper seems to employ an unusual and IMO a very convoluted automation paradigm where you need to have an envelope lane selected in order to select or modify its envelope points - and you can only have one lane selected at a time. I see no advantages in this workflow, only severe disadvantages.

This means, for example, that you cannot select points on several lanes in order to do some common operation to all of them - most commonly delete or move. In Reaper you're in big trouble If you have, say, 20 synchronized automation lanes and you need to move all of the points while keeping them in sync - a very common need. If you want to move points on all of the lanes, you can use "envelope points move with media items" (and add empty media items if there are none, which is another unnecessary workaround). But obviously this doesn't work if 1.) you want to do something else to them than move or 2.) if you want to move points on several, but not all lanes.

When you have to do a common operation on envelope segments on several lines, you have to go through all of them one by one, which is obviously a ridiculous proposition in a project with tens of automation envelopes. You can't even do "reduce number of points" on all the lanes simultaneously, but have to do it one by one.

Strangely I didn't find exactly this feature request being done before, even though it seems absolutely elementary to me. All the other hosts I know allow for lassoing envelope points on any number of lanes and then moving/deleting/readjusting/copying these. For some inexplicable reason Reaper seems to lack this basic feature. This relates to a previous feature request of selecting more than one envelope track, although that ticket didn't touch on what I think are the biggest issues here.

Here's a gif-animation of operating on points across multiple envelopes in Cubase 5:

This is from an older version of Cubase before the automation improvements in v6; also I forgot to do some basic operations in the video like move and copy. However, it still illustrates the point, I think.

Last edited by visa tapani; 11-16-2012 at 06:33 PM.
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