Please, Please, Please; Create a Way to Permanently Reverse clips in Multitrack Editor.

In case it's not obvious to the product owner(s) that reversing a clip is a fundamentally different task than reversing a file, please either do significantly more work to actually get into the head of a user, or get different product owners(s), because the two processes are quite different, and are for different purposes.


A curated example: My audio file's duration is 5:00 (mm:ss). The clip begins at 1:00.000 and ends at 1:00.011. If I just reverse the file, I end up processing a five minute song to reverse an eleven millisecond clip, and my newly reversed clip's range moves from 1:00.000-1:00.011 to 3:59.989-4:00.000. This means that when I go into the sample editor from multitrack and hit reverse and go back into multitrack, my clip is not only reversed, it will now contain a totally different section of the original sample.

And there's other problems: My audio file has now been reversed, but I only wanted eleven milliseconds of it reversed, not the whole song. And actually I wanted the clip in both a forward and backward form, because I'm hand-fixing a waveform using alternating forward and backward clips (which are all duplicates of the same thing). This is a common pattern I use regularly for covering up sound issues (not that I should have to share that with the internet to get a basic feature). So I actually technically have two seconds of these 11 millisecond clips, which yeah means there are around 180 clips, half of which are reversed. Things get a little extra fun too because really it's better if they're not all perfectly identical. Maybe even give them all a slight adjustments after cloning to make them not all start and end at exactly the same sample just to tweak the quality of the sound, make it less artificial.

Which really messes up the obvious method you're thinking, which is for me to bounce the clip first. But I actually don't want that. I don't want it to be a separate file. I want to be able to edit the original file and have those changes show up. In fact, I don't even want you to reverse the file at all. I want you to playback the clip in reverse, from a file in which it is in the original temporal direction. So read the file backwards, starting from the end of the clip, to the beginning of the clip. See how actually fundamentally different that is? It should not even be a file operation, so it also saves disk space (you should never need to have two files that have the same contents, where one is just reversed... it's so wasteful). Also, I need to be able to do it on a whim with a single mouse clip, just to see what it would sound like backwards, because that's key to workflow.

Don't resist this feature. Not having it is a deal breaker. Audition is just not on par with it's competitors without it.

Yeah, agree that this should be done. I don't need to be able to reverse an entire file. I just need to reverse the clip. That's why it should be at the clip level in multitrack, not the audio file level in the audio editor. Please just copy Ableton Live.

Double click on the file to open it in the Editor, then "Effects>Reverse..." is the current way to do it.

Please help us understand why this needs to happen "INSIDE the Multitrack Editor" so we could potentially prioritize it over other features. Is there something we are missing?

Yeah that is important, since I cannot see another easy way to check room tone length for all my clips in a project.