adding empty space to start of items

[Sound asleep]

Does anybody know how to reliably do this? I often like to have a sound byte that starts at some random place have empty space in front of it so that I can line the item up easily to the nearest bar, or start of a section or whatever.

I usually try to draw an empty item where I want it to start, and then overlap it, and then glue it. That sometimes works. I need to overlap it though.

I don't really understand why empty items work differently than items with audio in them. If I placed an item with audio instead, gluing a number of highlighted items would include any empty space between the items. But if you use an empty drawn item, it is stubborn, and remembers they were separate and it keeps them separate. This has made me want to kill myself on a number of occasions.

If anyone knows a better consistent way to accomplish this, then I will love you forever and ever.

[EpicSounds]

seems like moving the snap offset would be the simplest way. drag the lower left corner of the item to set the snap offset. When you drag or past the item the snap offset is used instead of item start.

[Sound asleep]

That's a good idea, but I'd really prefer to have the item sized with silence in front of it.

You know what? I just solved it. Idk why this isn't always my common practice, but the solution is actually pretty easy. Just ctrl drag an item with audio, place that where you want the start to be, and then drag the item volume hand all the way down to the bottom. Now it will glue just like items with audio do, except it will be completely silent.

[RobU]

Originally Posted by Sound asleep

Does anybody know how to reliably do this? I often like to have a sound byte that starts at some random place have empty space in front of it so that I can line the item up easily to the nearest bar, or start of a section or whatever.

I usually try to draw an empty item where I want it to start, and then overlap it, and then glue it. That sometimes works. I need to overlap it though.

I don't really understand why empty items work differently than items with audio in them. If I placed an item with audio instead, gluing a number of highlighted items would include any empty space between the items. But if you use an empty drawn item, it is stubborn, and remembers they were separate and it keeps them separate. This has made me want to kill myself on a number of occasions.

If anyone knows a better consistent way to accomplish this, then I will love you forever and ever.

Drawing an empty item creates a MIDI item, iirc, which might be why it's reluctant to glue to an audio item ?

Anyways, try this:

Select your randomly placed audio item

Create a time-selection around it where you want the item to start and end (snapped to the grid)

Glue item (action ID 41588) - this will extend it at either end to fit the time selection


That should do what you want

R

[Sound asleep]

Originally Posted by RobU

Drawing an empty item creates a MIDI item, iirc, which might be why it's reluctant to glue to an audio item ?

That would make a lot of sense. I guess in my mind it was neither a midi nor an audio item. It was just an item.

Anyways, try this:

Select your randomly placed audio item

Create a time-selection around it where you want the item to start and end (snapped to the grid)

Glue item (action ID 41588) - this will extend it at either end to fit the time selection


That should do what you want

R

Thx, that's actually exactly what I want. I'm not sure how often I'll use that as compared to my workaround though. I often enough like to have my time selection in a set place for a while.

Although I do have a key binding to make it disappear and store position, and then another to recall it, so I may end up using that one that way.

I guess it depends what sort of nearby audio items there are. A quick ctrl drag resize and lower volume to zero is a decent way to do it if the nearby items are decent. It's too bad I can't draw an audio item, but I think i understand a deeper reason why that's not really a good thing/possible.

I was looking into converting the item to an audio file, and I did find a xenakios command to save the item as an audio file, which leads me to believe that an audio item can only exist if it references an audio file. So I'd be constantly creating new files everywhere, which I don't want.

This is definitely good to know though. I had "G" as glue but ignoring time selection. Shift+G will work as you described.

[Sound asleep]

I just figured out something useful I think. I do believe that if you have an item highlited, ctrl+shift drag draws out that audio item. This would let me easily draw out a little item and either mute it or draw the volume handle down, and then gluing would work as I wanted.

[vanhaze]

Another option for you:

- first make sure you have reapack installed. (check www.reapack.com)
- then make sure you have me2beats repository installed.
(https://github.com/me2beats/reapack/...ster/index.xml)

- Now, make a custom action consisting of these actions:

Item: Glue items, ignoring time selection
Script: me2beats_Trim sel items edges to nearest measure (increase items length).lua

What the custom action does is this:

It will extend an item's left edge and right edge to the nearest bar grid.
The extended areas of the item on both sides will be empty spaces.
This way, you can easily copy or move the extended item on Grid.
And no need to change your time selection for it to work.

I use this custom action all the time for duplicating items that have no real relationship with Grid.

Hope this is useful to you !