The other day, HF brought up the subject of using playlist lanes and that it didn't seem to work well with voiceOver. I've looked into it further and, while it's possible to use VoiceOver to promote sections of various playlists to the master playlist, in my opinion, it's not as efficient as simply switching between playlists in normal waveform view. Here's what goes on when using playlist lanes instead of waveform view:
Lanes are displayed beneath the master playlist which is the top-most playlist. Two buttons appear in each playlist lane, a solo button and a button to copy to the main playlist. If you don't solo any playlist lane, you will hear nothing being played back from the main playlist, assuming it's empty. when you press a solo button within one of the playlist lanes, you will hear that particular playlist being played. Pressing other solo buttons will instead solo those playlist lanes. The tricky thing, however, is that the insertion point can be in any of the lanes while any of the lanes are soloed. In other words, you can solo lane 2 and scrub in lane 4. You will not hear the scrub because you have lane 2 in solo. Further, this mode of solo in playlist lanes is independent of the track's solo button. This can get a little confusing if you don't follow along. Further, if you're in a lane that is soloed and you move the insertion down to a lower lane with Control-semicolon, pressing Shift-s will not necessarily turn off the solo but it will solo the lane within which the insertion appears. The behavior is not what I'd call intuitive. Mind you, for a sighted person, it all makes perfect sense because one can see at a glance which lane is soloed and where the insertion point is located. It certainly is usable and it's quite possible to accomplish the task of promoting sections of various playlists with the Control-Option-v command after passing the keystroke through VoiceOver but, to me, it's still preferable to switch between playlists. My personal method for editing playlists is as follows: I always keep the initially created playlist blank and I automatically duplicate the empty playlist for each take. Assuming we've recorded 3 takes of a vocal, I'll start with choosing the overall best take and copying it in its entirety to the top-most main playlist. I'll normally listen through until the first objectionable word or phrase. Let's say the best take was take 3. I would then switch to take 1. Incidentally, setting a hotspot on the playlist selector is a good idea. That said, while switching between playlists, VoiceOver will normally stay focused on the playlist selector so just pressing control-Option-Space Bar will work almost every time. The hot spot helps as a backup. After listening to the alternate playlists, I select the phrase, usually while holding down the shift key while scrubbing but, of course, there are several ways of selecting the audio. One more switch to the main playlist and a paste and I continue on to the next problematic word or phrase. Compiling in this manner is perhaps not as quick as visually soloing between playlist lanes but it is very straight-forward and reliable. Slau -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Pro Tools Accessibility" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ptaccess+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
