On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 10:32 PM, Markku Tavasti <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 02/11/2015 08:53 PM, J. Liles wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 1:45 AM, Markku Tavasti <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>  How do I remove selected region from one audio track?
>>> I can create edit cursor, and crop track to that curson, but how do I do
>>> opposite, removing content in that particular cursor?
>>>
>>>  You can select the region at the playhead with C-Space and delete it
>> with
>> Delete.
>>
>> If that's not what you meant, then I'm afraid you'll have to be more
>> specific. If you can state clearly what kind of editing operation you'd
>> like to have and what you need it for, in the form of an enhancement
>> request in the issue tracker, then I'd be happy to consider implementing
>> it.
>>
>
> How I tried to do it:
>
> - move playahead to position 03:000, press C-[
> - move playahead to position 05:000, press C-]
> - Now I'd like to delete all audio from selected track between 03:000
>   and 05:000, (remove content of under edit cursor). Basicly, reverse
>   of 'Crop to range' operation.
>
> Found out, that instead of defining edit cursor, I should split on
> playahead, so I can get desired effect.
>
> For me it looks like that I don't understand how to use/what operations
> apply to edit cursor? And for playback cursor, even less idea how it works?


Ok, I see. Part of the problem is terminology. Region is the name of a type
of object on a track. You want to delete a range of audio from a track,
which isn't necessarily already defined by a region. Even the word 'delete'
is tricky, because I assume you don't want everything after the edit to be
moved forward in time.

As to the deal with the edit and playback cursors... This goes waaaay
back... In the world of text-editing it is customary to have at least three
'points'. p1 and p2 defining a range, region, span, whatever you want to
call it. These are the 'edit cursors'. And c, being the blinking cursor
where inserted characters go. Different edtiors use different terminology
for these, but the concept is the same and, usually, the available
operations are equivalent. This 3-point editing extends fairly well to
non-linear audio editors. (some edtiors have 4-point editing which is even
harder to explain).

In a text editor, it is indeed common to have functionality to "delete the
text between p1 and p2". I've never seen one that had a function to "blank
the text between p1 and p2" though, and that's where the analogy breaks
down a bit.

Now that the history lesson is over and you can see what the idea was, I
will freely admit that the array of available editing operations is not as
fleshed out as it could be. This is due less to them being complicated to
implement than to it being hard to come up with good key/mouse bindings to
assign to them.

FWIW, non-timeline has more editing ops that a lot of NLEs do. And in most
you have to switch to a different tool to e.g. split regions and then back
to the selection tool to move or delete them or whatever. Since
non-timeline is modeless, splitting a region twice (to chop out the part
you want to delete) and then deleting the middle is actually just as quick
and easy to do as it would be to define an edit range and invoke the key
combo to delete the range. Which I suppose answers the question of why,
even though I often perform the same operation, I've never bothered to add
an explicit function to do it.

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