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jcsteh
overlapping items
Hi James, I have a proposal: it can often happen that by selecting an item this is superimposed on one of greater length: example I have an item that goes from bar 2 to bar 20, I paste one that goes from bar 8 to bar 10. Or I have an item that goes from bar 1 to bar 8, and one that goes from bar 7 to bar 10: do you think it is possible to have osara signal that by selecting that item you are superimposed on a second item? Maybe the second item could also be silent and by trying to shorten the right side of the one you have selected you are not really shortening that part because it maybe ends a few bars later as it belongs to the superimposed one. Is there a way to do this? Could Osara report the item name with the added word overlaid? Thanks as always!
It's probably possible, but there are both user experience and technical challenges here.
Technically, I worry about performance (slowing things down), since theoretically, any earlier item on the track could overlap any later item; e.g. item 1 could overlap item 100, which could itself overlap item 200. OSARA would basically have to walk through all the items on the track to work out whether anything overlapped. I guess only experience would tell whether that's actually a problem in reality.
As far as user experience goes, there are a lot of questions:
- Items can overlap in several ways. One item can completely enclose another. One item can be completely enclosed by another. One item's left edge can overlap another item's right edge. Finally, one item's right edge can overlap another item's left edge. Would we want to report all of these differently or just say overlapped for any of them?
- If we're reporting the exact type of overlap, would we want to report how much the items overlap by or just the fact that they overlap?
- When you cross-fade items (which happens quite a lot in REAPER, especially if you have various auto cross-fade options enabled), that deliberately overlaps the edges of items. For example, if you cross-fade items 1 and 2, item 1's right edge will very slightly overlap with item 2's left edge (and conversely, item 2's left edge will very slightly overlap with item 1's right edge). Because of this, we'd end up reporting overlaps quite a lot - for any cross-fade - which probably starts to defeat the usefulness of reporting it.
Finally, the complexity here means this would be pretty time consuming to implement well. Thinking about this is already hurting my head and I haven't even started diving into it much. :)
CC @ScottChesworth for his thoughts.
Thanks James, absolutely not as you say it would be too complicated, and it could slow down the user experience a lot, I would say only if it were possible to try to signal that only the currently selected item is overlapping another item without indicating anything else, just to avoid the user working on one of them without realizing that the overlapping one could be much longer. As you say you should count all the items and it could get very complicated, but that you know is there a way to relate this to time? That is, is there an apii that can tell us if an item is selected, only at its beginning or at its end, is there any of the other items that cross the start or end position of that one by start or end? As a tip: when I select all the items of a track, osara makes me scroll through reaper with CTRL 7num or CTRL 9 num beginning or end of all those selected, so it knows them and knows which is the beginning and the end of the last one. Could building a structure with this data give us something? I know it's a big problem, James, and it gives me a headache as well as I'm thinking about it: you see, if you need to think about it, waiting for ideas, to close it or to wait for someone to propose a not too complicated idea. Thank you very much: Stephen.
CC @ScottChesworth for his thoughts.
I can't see the juice being worth the squeeze on this one TBH chaps. Call me a purest if you want, but I tend to think that maintaining a tidy timeline is the responsibility of individual users if they care about that, and so far, I haven't encountered or observed any huge gaps in the info we're currently able to obtain firsthand. Being able to visualize/conceptualize project architecture is something I drill my students on pretty hard when they're heading toward heavily layered projects, and to date, they all seem to be doing ok with what OSARA currently provides.
Hi Scott, what you say is right, I also always try to keep my projects in order, but there are situations where this is not possible: example when you use melodyne with ara, if you had not set it on the clip but on the track he feeds an item, he tends to lengthen it and therefore you would not know it a priori. Or you have enlarged an item from the left side because you have to add the first "stretchmarker" and you didn't have enough space in the item itself: or you have pasted a sentence from the first chorus into the second, but the part you took is slightly bigger than the one you had: or things done by the midi, you know that when you get hooked on the fly in reaper the lengths could, if you are in owerdub, be inconsistent with what you played. What do you think Scott?
I don't have any firsthand experience of Melodyne with ARA, but surely it only takes a couple seconds to verify item length after processing if that's something that can get changed inadvertently? Yes, we all want to save a couple of seconds as often as we can, but given that Jamie is concerned about performance impact, I'd rather keep the overall performance high for all users and just manually verify item length as part of my process here. The rest of the situations you outlined seem like accidents that are pretty easy to avoid if you're intentional about copying the right stuff, punching tidily etc. Just for clarity, if this can be implemented with minimal performance impact and you'd find it useful then I'm all for it, and of course, if that happens I'll be here testing and throwing in my thoughts on UX as usual. My one concern is decreased responsiveness, because I think that's something that gives OSARA a lead over the accessibility on offer in other DAWs.
Hi Scott, what do you think, in case James decides to try, possibly having a daring action for it and not having to make Dare do this task every time you select an item? This would not impact on the reactivity because the user would know he has to wait when he launches the action and daring to give him this feedback and otherwise when he simply selects the different items everything remains as it is now?
Maybe a solution would be to add feedback for the actions "Item navigation: Move cursor left to nearest item edge" and "Item navigation: Move cursor right to nearest item edge"? It would then be possible to determine the layout of the items on the track by reading through the item edges in order. I'm imagining the format to be something like "ItemNumber Itemname left edge bar 1 beat 1 0%" etc.
On Thu, 19 Nov 2020 at 14:33, ranetto [email protected] wrote:
Hi Scott, what do you think, in case James decides to try, possibly having a daring action for it and not having to make Dare do this task every time you select an item? This would not impact on the reactivity because the user would know he has to wait when he launches the action and daring to give him this feedback and otherwise when he simply selects the different items everything remains as it is now?
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Maybe a solution would be to add feedback for the actions "Item navigation: Move cursor left to nearest item edge" and "Item navigation: Move cursor right to nearest item edge"?
Seems like a good shout to me man. That way, OSARA's responsiveness doesn't change, and users have a new way to identify potential overlap issues. Dunno where we'd put those movements on the keymap, but hey, we'll figure that out if feedback happens.
Check if items overlap It can be used shift+a When prompted "2 items selected" Indicates that there are cross items In order to report the length/unit of the crossover time, I created a custom action. Custom action name: editable text report item duration/item cross duration Time selection: Set start point Xenakios/SWS: Select items under edit cursor on selected tracks Item navigation: Move cursor right to edge of item Time selection: Set end point Go to start of time selection OSARA: Report track/item/time selection (depending on focus)
Instructions: Ctrl + left and right cursors navigate to items and run the above custom action.
I am in China. Please forgive me, I am using a translator to talk to you.
