It would be absolutely awesome if there was a set of actions to toggle the default item fade length functionality on or off.
So, if you had "default item fades" turned ON, any splits you make or any new items you create would have fade lengths that are whatever value you have set in the preferences. If you had "default item fades" turned OFF, any splits you make or items you create from that point would have no default fade ins/outs created.
Of course, this should only apply to items changed/created AFTER you toggle the parameter, you want all of your fades generated before toggling to stay the same.
This would save me TONS of time going into the preferences all of the time and manually changing my default fade length to 0ms any time I don't want fades created. I could create a toolbar button for "item fades ON/OFF" and be on my way.
I think this would be a super easy feature to implement. Default fade length must be stored in a variable somewhere right, so all you have to do is set that variable to 0 whenever "default item fades" are disabled, and set it to whatever is entered in the text box in the preferences whenever "default item fades" are enabled.
This would also open up a lot of opportunities for custom actions. For me in particular, I really want to be able to have a simple action that creates a crossfade when I split, but without having to have my default fade length set to something >0 for it to work. I would like to keep default item fades turned OFF 99% of the time, but turn them ON if I want to split and item and create a crossfade. Currently, I have to have my default fade length set to 0ms for normal work, then when I want to split, I have to open the preferences, change the fade length to 5ms, make my splits, then go back to the preferences and type in 0 to set it back to 0ms. Having an action to toggle the default fades on/off would save tons of time!
Check out this video for a bit of related explanation:
http://www.adamwathan.com/reaper/def...xplanation.mov