Re: [Audacity-devel] Two More Questions

[Richard A. (audacity-devel) <ri...@au...>]

Chris Share wrote:
> 2. One popular request is for punch-in and punch-out recording. I was
> thinking that this would be a nice feature to add, but then it occurred
> to me that this isn't something that an "audio editor" needs. It's more
> appropriate to a multi-track recorder.
To me it's a hack used on analogue tape-based systems because there wasn'=
t
any better way of doing it. Computer-based systems can solve the same
problem in other ways, so you don't need to punch in.

All you are doing is making a recording whilst playing back the exisiting
tracks. As record tracks are fairly close to being free, why not just put
the re-recorded section in a new track? (OK, we need to be able to start
recording in the middle of a project time-wise. Can we do this already?)
Then we can trim the re-record to the right start / end point, audition i=
t
against the first go, and so on. We can have several more goes, and then
choose the best, which if we overwrote the original in the track we
certainly couldn't do.

Then finanlly we need to merge the chosen re-take into the main track.
Currently this is a complex business which has to be done with volume
envelopes and then quick mixing the tracks (assuming you want to
cross-fade the edits). What would be nice would be a drag-and-drop way of
putting the new recording over the old one, with an automatic removal of
the destination track and cross fading of the data.

Importantly, the clip needs to be time locked when you do the drag so you
can't shift it from side to side (this would be really useful in its' own
right (e.g. with ctrl-drag) for doing time-locked editing (e.g. to keep
video sync).

This might well mean implementing the often-talked-about cross-fading of
clips on a track, which would be useful in it's own right.

Richard