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M
Mobius Strip
Known Participant
October 17, 2017
Question

I'm having trouble selecting audio in Audition. Why?

  • October 17, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 3610 views

Hi all.

Before I file bug reports, I thought I'd ask if some basic functionality has perhaps been buried in obscure UI.

In what I would think is a fairly common scenario, I've selected a problematic section of an audio file and pressed the M key to create a region (or range as Audition calls it). What I want to do is overwrite an accidentally-spoken syllable with room tone from a nearby portion of the file. The length of the file can't change at all.

These are the problems I encountered:

1.  Double-clicking within the region doesn't select the audio between the markers. This is unexpected and inconvenient. Isn't that one of the major purposes of setting up a range, to make it readily selectable?

2.  Although there are hotkeys to move the playhead to the previous or next marker, holding the Shift key while doing so doesn't extend the selection (as a workaround for problem #1).

3.  Related to #2, using Shift to extend the selection seems to be broken for all keyboard navigation.  For example, if you press and hold Shift while pressing the right arrow, the selection isn't extended as the playhead moves.  This seems like a pretty glaring bug, doesn't it?  I hope it's a bug, because otherwise this would defy decades of GUI convention and pointlessly hobble users.

4.  I can't find any way to move the selection.  I'm talking about the selection highlight itself, not the audio within it.  In this example, I want to drag the selection to the right, in order to copy exactly enough room tone to overwrite the unwanted syllable.

5.  I can't find any way to paste-overwrite the selection; pasted material isn't confined to the current selection.  This prevents me from simply copying an ample (but inexact) amount of room tone and pasting it into the selected range (as a workaround for #4), because any paste operation changes the file length.

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    1 reply

    SteveG_AudioMasters_
    Community Expert
    SteveG_AudioMasters_Community Expert
    Community Expert
    October 17, 2017

    https://forums.adobe.com/people/Mobius+Strip  wrote

    Hi all.

    Before I file bug reports, I thought I'd ask if some basic functionality has perhaps been buried in obscure UI.

    These are the problems I encountered:

    1.  Double-clicking within the region doesn't select the audio between the markers. This is unexpected and inconvenient. Isn't that one of the major purposes of setting up a range, to make it readily selectable?

    It isn't easy to find the information about this, I grant you, but everything is working correctly in Audition - if you use it the way it's intended to be used! I do have a short video clip showing how to make selections, extend them, etc but the damn forum software won't let me post it. Suffice it to say that everything to do with manipulation is above the waveform display, and not on it:

    If you click on either of the grey handles on the marked selection (or in the item in the Markers window) it will select the range. You can extend it in either direction by pulling the handles below (surrounding the green selected area), and if you position the cursor in there so a hand is showing, you can drag the whole selection in either direction.

    The cut and paste options are comprehensive, and if you use the spectral display, you can restrict your cutting and pasting to selected spectral areas as well.

    The whole thing works pretty well, but don't expect it to follow the conventions that some other software you might be familiar uses - it's never been like that.

      ryclark
      ryclark
      Participating Frequently
      October 17, 2017

      I was a bit puzzled by your comments as I have been doing what you want to do to replace unwanted audio with roomtone for many years when restoring film soundtracks where it is vital to keep the audio in sync with picture. Then I realised that I always work in the Spectral Frequency Display when undertaking such operations.

      So if you work in the Spectral Frequency view then you can have direct on display grab and move the selected area using your mouse which, as you have discovered, doesn't work directly on the Waveform view. Also it is not necessary to use markers for selecting the audio, unless you wish to come back to that exact selection in the future. You should also find it is a lot easier to distinguish between the wanted and unwanted audio for this type of editing. Hopefully you will find it much quicker editing your audio in this way.

      M
      Mobius StripAuthor
      Known Participant
      October 17, 2017

      Thanks a lot for the replies, guys.

      But I disagree that everything is working "correctly." The primary display is the audio waveform; it gets the vast majority of screen real estate, and you can move about and perform editing operations there. If that's not "intended," then this is a grossly misguided UI design that Adobe itself has presented by default.

      None of the above comments addresses the failure of the selection extension to work. If you can select a range of something in a GUI and move the selection point, the Shift key extends that selection. This isn't an application-specific or even an OS-specific convention; it is and has been a universal standard of every major GUI I'm aware of since the '80s. There is absolutely no benefit to defying it, and doing so is a profound hindrance.

      I've never heard of anyone editing in a spectral display, but hey, if that works for you, great. But it makes no sense at all to expect users to guess that certain basic selection mechanisms are only available within it. I would bet that a solid majority of users have never even pulled up that display; I've never felt the need to do so. It totally lacks the precision required for the majority of editing I do.

      One thing I asked about that you can do in the spectrum pane is move the selection region. But again, why on earth would someone guess that he has to pull up the spectral display just to do that? Why not just let us do that in the timebar or the main editing pane, even if it requires a modifier key?

      The spectral display does offer some very interesting cutting and pasting options for band limiting, but I don't see how working in this pane exclusively could ever be considered faster than working in the waveform display. In addition to the profound lack of precision in identifying where specific sounds begin and end, drawing a selection rectangle and making sure it goes all the way from top to bottom of the pane is far, far fussier than clicking and dragging in the waveform editor (as just one example). Therefore I submit that using the spectral display as your main editing window is not intended.

      Also it is not necessary to use markers for selecting the audio, unless you wish to come back to that exact selection in the future.

      Which is exactly what I want to do, and which I do a lot. As I asked above, isn't this a major reason for setting up ranges in the first place?

      If you click on either of the grey handles on the marked selection (or in the item in the Markers window) it will select the range.

      Thanks for that info. That is just terrible UI, and inexplicable.

      And finally: I discovered that Mix Paste will indeed allow one to limit the pasting to the selection. Just set the existing-audio level to zero, and select "overwrite" under Paste Type. So all good on that one.

      I also notice that Audition offers a "paste to new" option in the Edit menu, which Adobe has huffily refused to add to Photoshop despite years of complaints. Go figure.

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