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Mobius Strip
Known Participant
October 17, 2017
Question

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

  • October 17, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 3608 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.

      SteveG_AudioMasters_
      Community Expert
      SteveG_AudioMasters_Community Expert
      Community Expert
      October 18, 2017

      No evidence other than decades of GUI implementations. And you claim to be citing Microsoft guidelines, but the ones you're citing are irrelevant here because they refer to specific functions like printing, which not every application supports. That's what Microsoft is attempting to explain to you.

      Here's what Microsoft says about extending selections (source: Guidelines for Keyboard User Interface Design (Windows)  )

      The initiation point for an extended selection is called the anchor. The final point for the input focus is called the destination. When a user makes an extended selection, such as when highlighting a paragraph of text by holding the SHIFT key and moving the cursor, all of the items between the anchor and the destination will be in the selected state.

      So Audition is violating guidelines from your own source. Like it or not, those guidelines haven't changed since the '80s and there's absolutely no reason for them to.


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

      So Audition is violating guidelines from your own source. Like it or not, those guidelines haven't changed since the '80s and there's absolutely no reason for them to.

      You seem to have overlooked the words 'such as'. Nowhere does that statement say that you are required to be able to extend a selection using the shift key - it merely suggests the possibility. When read in conjunction with the rest of the document, it becomes clear that this is not de rigueur. Adobe, as you've already discovered, has a bit of form when it comes to this, and it would appear from comments made in the past that one of the driving forces behind this is that they actively don't want to do what others do. One of the side-effects of this (and I believe that they regard this as a benefit) is that it makes the ergonomics of using other software seem strange after using theirs.

      Incidentally, I'm not condoning this in any way; I'm merely trying to explain why it is, and in fact why Adobe think that there's a good reason for it, although only from their POV, admittedly.

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