I was working with Presonus StudioOne 2 and I am really enjoying its Adaptive Snap option. It reminds me of Logic’s Smart snap. But I think this works better.
In a few words it “guesses” where you want to position an event taking into account its snap position.
So for example if your event starts at 2.3.4 , you can snap it either at 3.3.4 or at 3.1.1 . This means it is a combination of Snap To Grid and Grid Relative snap types. It is incredibly handy so that you don’t have to constantly switch between snap modes all the time.
If this already exists in Cubase please enlighten me. Otherwise it would be a neat feature for the next update.
Expand it to midi too so that midi parts either snap to the start of the part or the start of the first midi event in the event? Or better still, let’s have snap points on midi parts (for those reverse cymbal hits!).
I love the Smart snap in the Logic too. i can insert the note accurately on the grid, or little bit before, or later. This is great for legatos (do this with lenght) or detache, etc.
In the Cubase, I’m using combination of all snaps, it means, I’m using Smapping to Grid + Events + Cursors, which is most flexible to me.
Another really useful snap feature would be indicate what you’re snapping to.
I use Premiere Pro sometimes for editing video and when you use snap it points with an arrow to the object(s) you’re snapping to. So, for example, I want to line up to one of two very close clips, I can then easily see which it’s snapping to.
In fact, Wavelab has this feature too in the Montage snapping.
A feature like this would really save a lot of time in a complex project with 100 tracks where constant zooming in and out is the only way to ensure it’s correctly snapped. E.g. it could be snapping to anything in the whole project, and possibly something that looks close but is actually a few samples away from where you intend.
If the event doesn’t start on the grid, I will set the snap anchor in the event to the next gridline. This way I can use the regular grid mode most of the time.
When I’m closing gaps (and don’t want to have an overlap) I switch to “snap to events”. But having an overlap isn’t a problem, since I got a 5ms auto-crossfade enabled all the time anyway. Which means, having two shortcuts for “grid on/off” (default is J) and “set grid anchor to cursor” (I set it to [cmd]+[alt]+[R]) will work in 99% of the time anyway.