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"Quantize Item Position" Improvements (The Beat Detective Killer pt. 2) Issue Tools
issueid=2990 10-04-2010 12:12 PM
Human being with feelings
"Quantize Item Position" Improvements (The Beat Detective Killer pt. 2)

This is part 2 of The Beat Detective Killer request, for the first part see this thread: http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=66335

Currently the "Quantize Item Positions" is a little lacking and could use some love. This feature request will go over some desperately needed fixes for bugs in the current behavior, as well as additional improvements that can be made to make it the best in the business.

1. Improve "Extend starts..." and "Shorten earlier..." behavior (BUG FIX)
Currently there are some bugs with how the "Extend start..." and "Shorten earlier..." checkboxes work. Pictures below demonstrate best...

Items to be quantize along with the settings. Expected behavior is that each item is extended as far as necessary to create a 10ms overlap before the current start point of the items, and then each item is shortened so that the resulting overlap and crossfade is only 5ms.



Here's a picture showing the items quantized with no checkboxes checked, explaining the mechanics of what should happen. As you can see, even if the quantization already results in an overlap, items should be extended further so that there is at least a 10ms overlap before the item starts.


The current disastrous result! Notice the transient is chopped off of the second item. This is because the quantization already results in a significant overlap, so Reaper does not extend the item any further. The overlap needs to be before the item start, otherwise the transient is lost as seen here! Also notice, the second crossfade was not trimmed to 5ms. I believe this is because Reaper runs the "shorten" action before the "extend" action. So since they weren't overlapping at all prior to being extended, Reaper didn't shorten anything, and after they were extended and a 10ms overlap was created, Reaper had already run the shorten action so it didn't run it again.


This is of course the expected (and much better!) result:


Items are extended as much as necessary to facilitate a 10ms overlap prior to the next item start, and then that overlap is reduced to 5ms. This essentially creates a 5ms crossfade followed by a 5ms pad before the transient.

How the quantize item positions dialog should operate in order to give the best result!
Current wrong behavior seems to be this:
1. Quantize items to X grid value
2. Shorten items if overlapping by more than Y ms
3. Extend items to overlap by Z ms

The correct behavior is this:
1. Quantize items to X grid value
2. Extend items to overlap by an ADDITIONAL Z ms (so if they overlap already, still extend the start to overlap by Z MORE ms. If they don't overlap, extend to overlap by Z ms)
3. Shorten items if overlapping by more than Y ms

Also note, currently it automatically crossfades any overlap regardless of the autocrossfade settings. This is not alluded to in the Quantize Item Positions dialog. It should be either stated that a crossfade is going to be created or there should be a check box for "Crossfade resulting overlap", which is the final action run after everything else has been moved and trimmed as per the users settings.

2. "Extend starts..." and "Shorten earlier..." should be able to be run without also having to quantize

This is fairly straight forward. Those 2 actions are very very useful but can't be run without quantizing as well. It would be very useful to be able to use those actions to fill gaps on other material without forcing it to the grid. The easiest solution to this is to add a checkbox so you can run those actions without quantizing:



This way the user can use this dialog to fill gaps between items without forcing them to the grid.

3. Add "Strength" slider and "Ignore within" slider
This is functionality we already have in the MIDI editor's quantize dialog. The Strength slider controls how much it actually quantizes the item positions so that you can tighten things up without necessarily gridding them 100%. The Ignore Within slider will just avoid quantizing any item that is already close to the grid, based on whatever sensitivity you set the control to.

Discussion Thread: http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.p...342#post594342
Issue Details
Issue Type Feature Request
Project Deprecated REAPER issue tracker
Category Editing behavior
Status Suggested
Priority 1 - Highest
Suggested Version 3.69
Implemented Version (none)
Users who would use this feature 64
Users who would not use this feature 0
Assigned Users (none)
Tags (none)

10-12-2010 05:32 AM
Human being with feelings
 
Just wanted to add here that problems 1 and 2 have been solved if you are willing to use extensions.

I wrote a set of actions that handle that stuff with a lot of flexibility and behave more expectly:

SWS/AdamWathan: Fill gaps in selected items (advanced)

Would love to see that functionality get built into Reaper natively with a proper dialog though! ;)
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