Zooming in/out with wheel

[jmarck70]

Dear friends and developers:  I do heavy-duty multitrack audio mixing. My company is forcing a switch from Vegas to Audition after 15 years with the former program.  I'm looking for 3 functions that would make workflows much easier for everyone, even those who are native to Audition: 

1. Currently, zooming in and out on audio requires Ctrl + Scroll Wheel. Why can't it just be the scroll wheel? Why the need to hold down Ctrl? On Vegas, you simply use the wheel to zoom in and out. Which I constantly do. Hoaving to hold down Ctrl AND use the wheel totally unneccesary. Please advise

2. When in the "Timeline" tool, you can move around audio clips by right clicking/holding down the mouse. Why can't we do the more intuitive left click/hold? If that's possible to change, please point me to how I can make that switch. 

3. In Vegas, I can "ripple" (move an audio clip) and either every clip to the right of that clip in a given track, or every clip to the right of that clip in a project, with the click of a button on a toolbar. Furthermore, I can toggle that feature on and off with a hot key.  The latter seems possible by using Ctrl + E. Not sure if the former is available. And can the "Ctrl + E" be changed to a single hot key? And can a simple "Auto Ripple" button (with a drop-down inside to choose 'affected tracks' or 'all tracks') be added to the tool bar for ease of use? 

Of course I need to get used to this new software, but so far compared to Vegas it does a number of things better (cleaning up audio, levels, volume, lufts, compression, etc), but moving around small pieces of audio to precise places is a slower process.  Thanks for any and all help. 

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

1. People have asked about that before, but I think that the general consensus is that the majority of users are rather used to a straight scroll shifting the track layout, and the modifier doing zooming, and don't want it changed. I have to say that personally, I agree with you; what I'd rather see is an option in Multitrack Preferences to toggle the behaviours so everybody would be happy.

2. With the Time Selection Tool selected, moving the mouse up to the top of a track instantly converts it to a Move tool, and moving it down again reverts back to Time Selection mode again. And of course in Move mode, it's a left mouse click that lets you move the clips. So you don't need to change anything - just get used to slightly different behaviour.

3.  In Edit>Keyboard shortcuts there are a lot of things you can alter (and a few you can't, like the space bar). If you scroll down to the Edit section, you'll find that you can alter (because the existing key combination is awkward) the 'Select clips to end of Selected Track' to a single key (like X or Z), and this will select everything on that track forward of the time indicator/cursor. There's also a 'Select Clips to End of Session' option you could allocate a single keystroke to.

Audition's probabaly not going to do everything you want in exactly the way you want it to, but nothing major is going to alter, however much fuss anybody makes. Reason? Every time the devs alter something there's a major outcry from millions of users who like it just as it is! That said, I still think that there might be some mileage in having a few more toggle actions available. Anyway, hope that helps, at least a bit.

[jmarck70]

Thank you for your reply. This is really good info. Of course a new program can't be made to mirror everything from my old beloved program. And of course I'll get faster as new bits of muscle memory kick in.  (And of course I'm an old guy who doesn't want to change software at this point)

I just feel like if Adobe has genius developers for Photoshop that can literally add and remove and create anything out of thin air, and remove all the air conditioner/room noise out of my interview in Audition, they can make the scroll wheel zoom in and out on its own without having to press CTRL at the same time, or add a single button to a toolbar so users can ripple everything to the right on a single track or a whole project. 

Thanks again for your info. much appreciated

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

At least a part of the problem here is that the Audition developers now do all of the audio in all other Adobe products that use it - which inevitably means that you're stretching a finite resource. They are very much driven by corporate feedback (the big ticket users), and if they aren't prepared to pay for it - especially in the face of things they are prepared to pay for - then whatever it is, it's a long way down the list.

I have to say that a lot of people find this very hard to accept, but it's the commercial reality of running a successful company where you have to satisfy the shareholders. Anything that an individual, or even a few hundred of them, wants pales into complete insignificance besides the users with seat numbers running into 6 or 7 figures. And yes, they exist...