How in the hell do I move synth audio track automation along with clips?

That's one of the cases where you need to split the simple instrument track first, then drag select over both the midi track and the audio/automation track (making sure the midi clips are completely within the selection). Then you can drag to a new location and recombine the tracks when finished.

I think the reason you can't drag automation towards the left is because of the nodes at the beginning of the tracks. Did you try moving those first to where you want the project to start?

Does "delete hole" work?

jb101
Does "delete hole" work?

Nope. It shifts everything except the automation. 

Interesting, it works fine here if I use the "Delete Special" menu and delete a hole.
 
Do you have MIDI data "in the hole" when you're deleting it ?.
If not, than that could be the problem ... that's the one thing I didn't test.
 
Otherwise, it may be a selection problem you're having.
I just tested this using a synth track with automation on the audio track (which as you point out is otherwise empty), and automation on BUSses too.
 
If I remember correctly it was buggy in X1.
X2 I think it worked OK, and X3 is definitely working fine here.
Just be careful to make sure you do have everything selected, I know I tripped up when first testing it out in X3.
 
I tested it twice just to make sure, and everything moved over, including all the automation on both tracks and busses.
 
Good luck.
 
Cheers - Cliff

I'm sure I've done this successfully though sharke.
 
I'll be home in a couple of hours and try it again, see what happens.

OK so now I suspect that I have some kind of corruption going on in the project I'm trying to do this in. 
 
I've been trying "delete hole" over and over again and finally it moved the automation. But there's a new problem. It only moved the automation if I had "move by whole measures" selected. However, with this selected, it moved everything 11 bars to the left, not 12. Without it selected, it moved all the clips 12 bars to the left but not the automation. 
 
So to be clear, here is what's going on now
 
1) I have 12 empty bars at the start of the project
2) I have synth audio tracks that have automation in them, but obviously no MIDI or audio data since it's just a synth's audio output track
3) If I lasso all of the clips past bar 12 and drag them over to bar 1, everything moves except the synth automation
4) If I insert a dummy clip 12 bars long into the start of the project on one of the tracks, select it, then select all tracks, then "delete special" with every option selected and "delete hole" with "move by whole measures" selected, everything including the synth automation is moved 11 bars to the left, so I still have one empty bar at the start of the track
5) If I do the above step but without "move by whole measures" selected, everything is moved 12 bars to the left but the synth automation stays where it is. 
 
This is all shades of messed up. 

sharke

StepD
That's one of the cases where you need to split the simple instrument track first, then drag select over both the midi track and the audio/automation track (making sure the midi clips are completely within the selection). Then you can drag to a new location and recombine the tracks when finished.

It's not a simple instrument track. I was talking about the audio track part of a MIDI/audio synth pair. It has automation on it, but of course it has no audio or MIDI clips in it. If it did, then the automation would be selected with the clips. 

Well, same thing then except you can skip splitting the track since it already is split. Select and drag.

StepD

sharke

StepD
That's one of the cases where you need to split the simple instrument track first, then drag select over both the midi track and the audio/automation track (making sure the midi clips are completely within the selection). Then you can drag to a new location and recombine the tracks when finished.

It's not a simple instrument track. I was talking about the audio track part of a MIDI/audio synth pair. It has automation on it, but of course it has no audio or MIDI clips in it. If it did, then the automation would be selected with the clips. 

Well, same thing then except you can skip splitting the track since it already is split. Select and drag.

This is what I was doing (see original post). The problem is that the automation on the synth audio track is not dragging with everything else. 

sharke
 
This is what I was doing (see original post). The problem is that the automation on the synth audio track is not dragging with everything else. 

Can you post a quick vid of that to see exactly what you're doing? I have no problem moving both after marquee selecting.

One caveat regarding select by lasso:  Lasso only selects whatever is currently shown by the edit filter, so the automation won't be included if the edit filter is set to clips. You can do the initial selection by lasso, but then you need to Ctrl-click add the track with the automation to the selection. Selecting the time range and tracks separately avoids this.

All the edit filters are set to clips. There is no logical reason why lassoing everything would result in everything being selected except one random clip in the middle of the project. 
 
Things just get weirder. Here is a screenshot of the whole project. I've just lassoed everything. Note the relative positions of the clips within the red rectangle. 
 

 
I then dragged everything across to bar 1. Below is a screenshot of the result. Observe how after the drag, only some of the clips are selected (it seems to be random). Also note the same clips within the red rectangle - they are now positioned differently relative to each other than before the drag. It's like I've drag copied instead of dragged, and left some clips remaining. But all I did was drag, I didn't CTRL-drag anything. 

 
 
I'm just at a loss to work out what's going on here. These things are typical of the oddities that seem to build up in a project the longer I work on it. If this is expected behavior and there's some kind of functionality that I'm not getting, I'd like it explained. Otherwise I'm curious to know why such a simple task as selecting and dragging clips still doesn't work properly. 

So I started a new project and inserted some random audio and MIDI tracks with clips in them, and tried to reproduce this behavior. It's not happening - I can select all audio and MIDI clips and drag them from a MIDI clip and they move without copying. Looks like this oddity is yet another case of a project steadily going screwy over time. I have projects from the past that I've abandoned because too much weird stuff like this started happening in them. And it always seems to be very basic stuff like moving clips around and copying. Think I'll send this project to Cake. 

I'm dragging on the left hand side of the clip like I always do. And I'm grabbing the same part of the clip when I drag MIDI clips as when I drag audio clips, and yet both behave differently.

Bristol_Jonesey
I think what lawp was alluding to is that in the X series, sometimes it matters whereabouts vertically in the clip you start the click & drag action.
 
Whether it makes any difference or not, I don't know

Vertically speaking, the only place you can drag a clip from is the bar at the top. Here, the icon turns into that directional cross thingy. You cannot drag a clip from anywhere else. The horizontal position from where you drag is important though - if you do it from the left then you're going to be snapping the left side of the clip, and if you do it from the right then the right side snaps. As far as I know, there is no way to drag-copy a clip without holding down CTRL as you drag. And I definitely wasn't doing that.