[7.19] Track lanes: Move items up if possible to minimize lane usage not as described

[greatzot]

Various times, to no avail, I have tried to use the action "Track lanes: Move items up if possible to minimize lane usage".

It took me a while to figure out what's going on, but it seems to be the following.

The action *sounds like* it will do what Cubase can do in a similar scenario--i.e., if a given take (item) occupies a certain space in a timeline, and there is a lane somewhere (anywhere) above where the same timeline space is empty, it will move that take up and give you a fairly neat consolidated view of all your takes in a much smaller list of lanes. Very helpful for multitrack comping.

However, what the action *actually does* appears to be merely, if a take (item) doesn't overlap at all with the one in the lane just above it, it will move it up one lane. Otherwise, it will do absolutely nothing.

The trouble with that, of course, is you could easily have several sections of a song where each group of takes overlaps with the previous group, yet various non-adjacent sections (e.g., first and third, or second and fourth) will not overlap at all. So you should be able to consolidate those non-adjacent, non-overlapping takes onto a single lane, regardless of any adjacent section's overlap. But because the first take of each section overlaps slightly with the previous section, and every take within the section inherently overlaps with all takes of the same section, the result is nothing happens and you still have the same number of lanes.

So it looks buggy to me.

[schwa]

The action looks at each item in lane 2 and moves it up if there is room, then looks at each item in lane 3 and moves it up if there is room, etc. Items may move up multiple lanes, but items will never skip over other items. The idea is that an item that was recorded after an overlapping item will always remain below that item.

We could add a second version of this action that does not try to preserve relative lane positions of overlapping items.

[greatzot]

Originally Posted by schwa

The action looks at each item in lane 2 and moves it up if there is room, then looks at each item in lane 3 and moves it up if there is room, etc. Items may move up multiple lanes, but items will never skip over other items. The idea is that an item that was recorded after an overlapping item will always remain below that item.

We could add a second version of this action that does not try to preserve relative lane positions of overlapping items.

I'd very much appreciate a new version of the action, though I also think a name change or additional clarification might be in order--the way it currently works sounds something more like "Move items up until overlapping item is found to reduce lane usage." A true minimization to my ears would be looking at all above lanes and seeing if there's a place where takes could fit to end up with the smallest possible number of lanes.

That said, I agree that, where there is space on the timeline available in higher lanes, moving the earlier takes to higher lanes and later takes to lower lanes makes sense. I just don't particularly care if higher lanes contain some stuff recorded later than some stuff in lower lanes, as it's inherent in comping anyway that the actual time any given take was recorded in real time gets disregarded, and the listener of the finished version has no idea, e.g., that the last chorus was actually recorded before the first verse. The more important thing is just that whatever it does, it does it consistently across multitracks.