EASY ENVELOPPE QUESTION

Hi,

When I press shift - f , I can see the totality of my song. It seems always too long since there are nodes of enveloppe somewhere along the road. Meaning, after my song is over, it still continues because some nodes are hidden.

There is too many tracks and enveloppes! Is there a trick to delete all nodes after a certain point?

Is it possible for me to decide to delete everything - including nodes of enveloppes - after , say, 1 min 30 ?

AND by the way, do you know HOW to look at ALL the enveloppe in a track at the same time ?

Thanks!

There's a kludgy way to do this. Select all tracks. Then go to the time that you want to be the end of the song (Snap to Clip Landmarks can help here). Set From=Now. Then go to the X1-defined end of the song using control-end and Set Thru=Now. Now delete, making sure to tick all the boxes.

This doesn't work for bus envelopes, which also affect where the end of the song is.

Cheers, Peter.

I posted the same questions a couple months ago because I like to "cleaning up" my projects toward the end, getting rid of stray nodes.  Bit - I'm glad I'm not the only one who does this.

The "end of the project", wherever Sonar thinks that is, is important to me because in my work flow I don't do any post processing to the wave file after exporting.  I don't like a wave file that is bigger than it has to be.  Lot's of people use a different program for mastering and take care of any dead space there - but I don't do that.  Once I export a Wave - it is done.  I'll create an MP3 off the wave and update my web page.  I don't like the MP3 to have a lot of dead space at the end.

Here's my previous post which contains great feedback from Scott:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=2258418&high=nodes
As it turns out you can lasso nodes and then delete them - but only in the tracks.  You cannot do this on busses.  Unfortunately if the envelope is not selected in the edit filter the nodes are really hard to see.  I'm hoping we can get Cakewalk to change this, but it seems most users have developed a work around and don't care about this issue.

Randy, it seems to be an issue after I've shortened the song. For example, the song may start out with a long MIDI click track that will get truncated later on.

SONAR initially bases its internal end-of-song marker on the last MIDI note in the click track. Any automation you add will automatically place a node at that point. Then, when you subsequently truncate the original MIDI track, you're left with a bunch of automation nodes out past the end of the song. When you ultimately export the finished audio there will be a long silence at the end that has to be trimmed.

Sometimes, though, SONAR will continue to insist that the song ends out there past the real end, even after you've deleted every event. I have even seen automation continue to be applied to a MIDI track after the envelope was deleted! Makes me wonder if some internal buffer is not being flushed properly.

It's been noted many times before that SONAR's automation needs some attention from CW. When it was announced that X1's focus would be on "workflow enhancements", I'd kinda hoped this was the sort of thing they were talking about. Sadly, that was not the case.

bitflipper


Randy, it seems to be an issue after I've shortened the song. For example, the song may start out with a long MIDI click track that will get truncated later on.

SONAR initially bases its internal end-of-song marker on the last MIDI note in the click track. Any automation you add will automatically place a node at that point. Then, when you subsequently truncate the original MIDI track, you're left with a bunch of automation nodes out past the end of the song. When you ultimately export the finished audio there will be a long silence at the end that has to be trimmed.

Sometimes, though, SONAR will continue to insist that the song ends out there past the real end, even after you've deleted every event. I have even seen automation continue to be applied to a MIDI track after the envelope was deleted! Makes me wonder if some internal buffer is not being flushed properly.

It's been noted many times before that SONAR's automation needs some attention from CW. When it was announced that X1's focus would be on "workflow enhancements", I'd kinda hoped this was the sort of thing they were talking about. Sadly, that was not the case.

Right on post, David, as per your usual.  That's exactly what happens with this end-of-song problem.  Sonar keeps seeing automation which is no longer visible in the timeline, because in the course of the project, you've shortened the MIDI track, but the data is still there.  Most of us keep the non-destructive MIDI option on, and so all sorts of hidden data piles up in our projects.

Having a real, bonafide "End of Project!" marker available seems so basic, so obviously needed, but as we know, we don't have that in Sonar.

I don't mean to be argumentative or coy, all I can say is that this particular issue has never been an issue for me, like I said before.  I mentioned that sometimes I'll trim off excess time in SoundForge - But actually, that occasion is super rare.  Most of the time, I know where the end of the project really is by listening - Sometimes I drop a marker in the time line as a guide.  I sweep through the Time Line, selecting what I need - that's a 2 second operation, and without fail, I get what I want in the export.

The problem is when the user doesn't make any selection - just enables all the tracks, and leaves the selection as something automatically chosen by Sonar.  I know that one reason my hand-selection method in the above paragraph is so engrained in me, is that from the very start, I never let Cakewalk decide what my selection is.

So - it would be great if this was fixed in Sonar, if more sophistication could be added to the program to make the end of the project more straight forward, I totally agree.  In the meantime, I highly recommend people do their own time line selection - you really can pretty easily do exports that end where they should.

Randy B.

Randy - I must be getting cotchety and stubborn as I get older.  I've always "let" Sonar determine my song length as I have always cleaned up excess crap at the end of my song.  To do the time selection you've got to be 1) in track view, 2) zoomed properly and 3) it helps to have a mouse.  Since I'm on a laptop I end up using a trackpad a lot of the times out of conveinience.  And clicking and dragging a LARGER selection on the trackpad isn't great (especially when it needs to be precise).  The other thing is I don't like leaving anything in a state of selection, so for me it would be another click to de-select. 

Lots of times I'm going in and out of Sonar and making a quick edit because of something I heard in my car.  I go in, make the change to whatever, Ctl-S, and export.  I don't want to worry about having to be in the track view much less the correct zoom.  Nor do I change anything in the export dialogue box - that would be too much fiddling.   I know it is only click for track veiw, and a couple clips for the proper zoom, and a precise click and drag for the selection, export, and then de-select.  For a decade I've been real disciplined on cleaning up my project just so I don't have to do all that.  Again - I'm stubborn about this (I know!) - and I go for the fastest possible operations. 
 
Oh - probably adding the fuel to my stubbornness is the fact that I'm a software designer and pay a lot of attention to efficiency of user interface.  I just don't like the time selection idea when it is not necessary.

Geno

bitflipper

markers defining (and later refining!) the working sections of a song, or songs within a project is one of the first things I would put in place.

Absolutely! At the very least, Start-of-Song and End-of-Song markers. It could be implemented within the framework of their existing marker support with the addition of a new property to the marker object. I suggested this long ago, and at the time Noel replied that it was a good idea. I'd hoped it might be in SONAR 7, but it wasn't. Ditto for 8, 8.5 and X1.

Eh. I see you completely misunderstood. I place the markers, and they define start and end points.
But now I see why. You guys aren't in or don't use track view so the 'markers method I mentioned doesn't even relate.
Fantastic, and each to their own.

I'm a total noob so this may be stupid. If you guys are doing something like a commercial, could you predefine track templates of 15, 30 or 60 seconds with pre-recorded clicks? essentially a track with nothing on it. I know nothing of track templates so this may not work. If I was doing that kind of work I think I'd want to sit down and load up a blank template for a spot and build my tracks within the pre-defined template. This is likely too obvious to be valid but I'm learning.

You guys aren't in or don't use track view...

I may have misunderstood your point, but in fact I live in the track view. That and the PRV.

What I'm suggesting is user-placed markers just like we all drop into every new project as a matter of course, but adding the ability to optionally assign special meaning to some of them. Such as "song starts here" and "song ends here".

We become accustomed to working in particular ways, and we develop different expectations.  All I know is that exporting the portion of the time line I want, making my own selection, has always been such a simple, fast procedure.  I don't get why it's any kind of hassle.  Oh well.

Randy B.