[ferropop]

Originally Posted by BirdBird

It works really well! That being said... time to nitpick

Vertical Dividers
When zoomed out it is really hard to drag the entire area, as there are hotspots for the vertical dividers everywhere:

I believe a potentially better way to handle this would be to draw the area as a solid block instead, and have an Area Selection -----> Left Drag context modifier to remove tracks/envelopes from the area.

Maybe easier: when hovering over Area and holding Duplicate Modifier (Ctrl), disable the vertical dividers as they are unnecessary when holding the modifier.

Visual feedback
When drawing new areas that overlap with the existing ones it does get hard to see where where the area starts and where it ends. The new information (the new area being drawn in this case) should be brighter than the previous existing area. (Or perhaps the brightness of the old area should be dimmed during the operation)

Agreed or even just the box border color be lighter.

Snapping
Currently the beginning of the area snaps to the previous grid division, the end of the area snaps to the nearest grid division. Solving this inconsistency would make the area selection much more intuitive to use.
So either:
Area Beginning -----> Snaps to previous grid
Area End -------------> Snaps to next grid
So the user is always focused on ''drawing into'' the grid.
OR
Area Beginning -----> Snaps to closest grid
Area Beginning -----> Snaps to closest grid
So the user is always focused on aiming for the grid division.

I personally find aiming for the grid division a tad easier to operate visually. Would be curious to hear what everyone else thinks.

Will play with this to give feedback, but you have Area Beginning written twice for your Snaps to closest Grid proposal ... bringing it up just so it doesn't cause confusion

Movement
When vertically zoomed out it can be hard to move things on the horizontal or the vertical axis only. Mouse modifiers to constrain movement horizontally or vertically in the Area Selection context would be very useful and needed in some cases.

Agree, locking would be great, or my proposal above of leaving intact the selected area when Ctrl-Dragging so you have a visual guide of where you are coming from.

Duplicate area
One of the most common operations musicians use with area selection is selecting an area and hitting a keyboard shortcut to duplicate it right at the end of the area. Maybe I missed it but I couldn't find an action that does this.

SUPER important. People want to select stuff, and hit Duplicate Area x times. This should very importantly work in conjunction with Trim Content Behind Media Items When Editing, as often you just want to drag in some stuff, Select Area, and hit duplicate a bunch of times and have it just overtake the stuff it's pasting over rather than creating a mess of layers/crossfades etc. The area should simply replace what it's overlapping when duplicating in that mode.