EditingAudio

Time Selection

What is a time selection?

A time selection is a selection of audio that is designated by both a start and an end point along the timeline. You can make audio selections in 2 ways. The first simply requires you to hold down the shift key while scrubbing. The audio you hear is the audio selected.

The second requires being specific as to the location of the start and end selection points.

To make a time selection, navigate to where the selection should begin by either pressing pause at that point, scrubbing with the left and right arrow keys, or a combination thereof, and press the left bracket key.

To end your time selection, move to that point and press the right bracket key.

If you press control+R, while your play cursor is in your time selection, you will hear it repeated.

To make reaper stop at the end of your time selection, go to preferences with control+p, go to the playback section, and make sure that the "Stop playback at end of loop if repeat is disabled" checkbox is checked

Now, go to the editing section, and make sure that the "Move edit cursor to start of time selection on time selection change," and the "Link loop points to time selection," check boxes are checked.

To navigate with in your time selection, press home to go to its beginning, and end to go to its end.

Should you discover that your time selection isn't exactly as precise as you'd like, you can grow and shrink it as necessary by moving the start and end points.

Use the control left and right bracket keys to move the starting point, and the alt left and right bracket keys to move the end point.

If the changes are too finite for your taste, or if 1 key press is making a more dramatic change than you'd like, remember that zooming effects the selection, just as it does with any means of navigating.

When you want to select multiple tracks, you're now working in 3d, because selections go up, down, left and right. Shift+upArrow and Shift+DownArrow select tracks, and the shift left and right arrows select time.

Smart selections

If you want to copy a particular piece of audio from 1 or more tracks, and paste it elsewhere, do the following.

1. Make a time selection.
2. Select some tracks.
3. Press alt+shift+a to select all items on those tracks within that

time selection.

1. Press control+shift+c to smart copy.
2. Now, if you move somewhere and paste, you should just get the audio you copied.

Noncontiguous selection

To select tracks which are not contiguous, that is, they aren't next to each other:

1. Press shift+Space to get in to the noncontiguous selection mode.
2. Navigate through tracks with shiftTheArrowKeys.
3. To select, press shift+Space on any track you wish to add.

Items

What is an item?

An item is essentially a container. This container can have any media. Media includes video, audio, midi, and even images. When you insert a file on a track, you are inserting an item on a track that contains the inserted media in it.

Navigating Items

There are several keys worth noting when navigating items. We'll first discuss navigating items and selecting them.

• to navigate from item to item you can use control left arrow or control right arrow. Think of it as the equivalent to navigating a document by words.
• You can navigate and select items consecutively by control shift right and control shift left arrow. this will navigate to and select each item. You can report the selection with control shift space. Control shift space reports selections dependent on what is currently selected.

Editing items

When you edit items, you are making splits, therefore, making it into smaller items. Pressing S at the edit or play cursor will split items at the edit or play cursor across all tracks if none are selected. If you select a certain number of tracks it is more likely to split items specifically on those tracks. However, if you press the letter A at the edit or play cursor it will select the current item and then split at that point. this means you will more likely split at the point that you want if you are trying to work on one track specifically. If you want to work on multiple tracks or multiple items, pressing either s for split items at edit or play cursor, or shift s for split items at time selection will do the trick.

Moving items

You can nudge items to the left or right a bit. You do this by pressing comma to nudge items to the left or period to nudge items to the right. Alternatively, you can use numpad 4 to nudge them to the left and numpad 6 to nudge them to the right.

Cutting, copying and pasting

As we mentioned before, items are like words. You can move different words around in the document. by cutting, copying, or pasting. Just like in documents, control x cuts, control C copies, and Control V pastes. Remember though that this is dependent on focus, so if you have an item focused, it will cut, copy or paste the item. However, if a track is focused, then these actions will cut, copy or paste the track that is focused.

Ripple Editing

Ripple editing is a mode that you can toggle that will help you depending on what you want to edit. You can toggle ripple modes by pressing Alt P to cycle between ripple editing options. You can toggle between 3 modes, off, ripple per track, or ripple all tracks. You can check the ripple mode by pressing alt shift P

• If ripple is off, this means that if items are cut, moved, deleted, etc, a space is left where the item was originally. this is similar to inserting a bit of silence. The length is preserved but the item itself is gone, therefore, resulting in empty space.
• If ripple is per track, this means that when items are moved, cut, or deleted, items after it will move forward, only for the currently focused track. So example, in the previous case, if you deleted an item while ripple was off, where the item was deleted there would be an empty space. Instead, in this case, all of the items would shift forward on that track to fill the space, therefore moving forward on the timeline for only the currently focused track.
• Ripple all tracks is similar to ripple per track, however, instead of the items only on that track moving to fill the space that the move or deleted item left behind, all items on all tracks would compensate and move forward. Ripple is also respected if items are inserted. If you insert an item and you have ripple on for either per track or all tracks, items to the right of it will be shoved backward in order to make move for the newly inserted item.

Growing and shrinking items

Sometimes, you make a cut and split an item that might have a little part of a phrase or breath, or any number of errors that you want to get rid of. One thing you could do is to find where the error is in the item, split it off and then delete it, or you could simply grow or shrink the item. When you grow or shrink the item, you basically cut or stretch the boundaries of the item. It's worth noting that this does not affect the original media. You can grow or shrink the item by either growing or shrinking the right or left edge of the item.

• You can grow or shrink the left edge by pressing either control comma and period. Or for those who are more comfortable with numpad navigation control numpad4 to grow and control numpad 6 to shrink the left edge of the item.
• You can do the same thing to the right side of the item. You can grow and shrink the right edge by pressing alt comma to shrink the right edge and alt period to grow the right edge. You can also use alt numpad 4 to shrink the right edge and alt numpad 6 to grow the right edge of the item.