Feature request: Loop Marker status overlay

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Misplaced
Posts: 18
Joined: May 30th, 6:05 am

Feature request: Loop Marker status overlay

Post by Misplaced »

I am using MTD as a way of recording audio in sync with another DAW playing a loop in the background (via AudioBus play control). This means I am making quite a lot of use of looping to create different length loops that match the currently looping section in the background DAW. I find it quite fiddly to create accurate loop regions, especially when zoomed out, and sometimes end up with a section that is not quite the size that I thought I had set. My brain also hurts a little when trying to do the maths to work out where the loop should end to make it n bars.

It would be very useful therefore to have some indication as to the length of the loop region which updates as you change the length. In my mind this would be a simple beats/bar (or time, if you have that selected for the ruler) overlay that appears only while you are dragging out the length of the loop. It might also show the start and end point as well so the user can see if they missed where they thought the loop should have started or ended.

Edit: the overlay that you see when resizing a region was the sort of thing I was thinking of.

Edit 2: this would also apply to the punch-in/out cursors as they are also used to define a record area.

Thanks!
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pwnified
Posts: 1565
Joined: August 17th, 9:41 pm

Re: Feature request: Loop Marker status overlay

Post by pwnified »

Interesting thoughts. You can turn on Snap in the menu to adjust regions easily to any ruler line. Does this help?
Agreed about the punch in/out tooltips, it's on the TODO list along with ones for the loop markers.
I'll have to think about a length indicator, it seemed to be confusing if a region doesn't start at a bar line then the tooltip value is off. That's the reason I originally rejected it, because it's snapping to absolute position and not region length.
It would be nice to have a different 'mode' maybe, where region editing/recording is quantized to bars.
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Misplaced
Posts: 18
Joined: May 30th, 6:05 am

Re: Feature request: Loop Marker status overlay

Post by Misplaced »

Yeah, snap is always on when I am trying to line things up accurately. The ability to snap to other non-quantised objects was a really useful recent addition, by the way

It is normally fine to find the end point of a drag operation when I’m zoomed in as I can see the ruler bar marks but if I need to create a larger loop then I need to be zoomed out and at that point it increases the chance that I’ll go just over or under the bar mark due to jittery fingers.

Grid snapping to a particular beat or time division would certainly help with this, I agree. Even without the overlay to tell me the length of the bar, it is easier to count the bars if there is some less granular grid snapping going on - one less thing to concentrate on! Normally when a DAW offers this there would be a selection of time divisions, e.g. 1/n up to 1 bar, plus maybe triplet and dotted note length variations. This could apply to moving things around, dragging the bounds of regions or loop markers, or even as you said recording start and stop.

Thanks.
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