Multitrack - How do you stop the playhead when it reaches the end of all tracks?

[TorQueMoD2]

By default, the length of a multitrack is 30 seconds, but there doesn't seem to be a way to shorten it. I'm working on an audio file that's less than 1 second, and it's irritating to have to manually stop it all the time. It should just automatically stop when it gets to the end of all tracks. Is it possible to set this somewhere?

[EuanWilliamson · Accepted solution]

It sounds like you need to adjust your in/out points.

The simplest way is to bring the playhead to the start of what you need and press [I] on your keyboard to establish the In, then bring the playhead to the end and press [O] for the Out.

Another way is to the drag the in/out brackets on the timeline to where you need them.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

The trouble with 'it should just stop when it gets to the end of all tracks' is that the playback mechanism has no idea where that is! Since you can place clips anywhere on the timeline, and the player will just play them when it gets to them, how is it supposed to know when there aren't any more? Whilst I suppose that coding look-ahead behaviour might be possible, I think it would be regarded as something of a waste of resources just to enable playback to stop. Euen is correct; you have to highlight the time range you want and make sure that the settings in Edit>Preferences>Playback and Recording are set so that playback stops at the end of the selected time range.

[TorQueMoD2]

It could get an array of all of the tracks, then grab the last track in the array and get its position on the timeline. You could find the ending point by calculating the duration of the last track and setting that as the end point. It's really not hard to code and wouldn't be a waste of resources at all. It would take barely a few milliseconds to do that search when you hit play unless you've got thousands of tracks in the timeline. I'm sure the Audition programmers would know how to implement it though. 

Good to know that you can mark an in and out point though.

Thanks guys!

[SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Accepted solution]

Everybody thinks that this stuff is simple. It isn't. For instance, in this case you wouldn't want playback to stop at the end if, say, reverb was added*.

But it occurred to me after saying that Euan was correct,  that actually, you don't need to do any of this stuff and you can do exactly what you want quite simply. If you want the session length to be very short, all you do is put your one second of tracks into Multitrack view and hit the 'Zoom out Full (all axes) button, (or Ctrl + \). All of a sudden your session will become just slightly longer than the longest track in it. (* this is why it's longer).

[EuanWilliamson]

Yes, definitely easier !!
( one more method to remove the epidemis of a feline protagonist)

[TorQueMoD2]

Cool. I'll try that. 
I could argue the point that it would be fairly trivial for the programmers at Adobe to create a way to have the play head stop automatically, but it's a moot point.  Thanks for the zoom suggestion 🙂

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

No, it's still not trivial, because you also have to take account of multitrack round-trip performance with Premiere. You really wouldn't want to mess with the session length if you do that, however you look at it.