Tricky title. Hopefully my gif clarifies what I’m looking for:
This has been something I’ve been meaning to ask for, for quite a while now: Making a selection and then being able, by keyboard shortcut, to jump back and forth – to places before and after the selection – while keeping its same length. I.e. by increments of the selection’s length.
The uses cases for this are many! Would improve editing even more!
Since you can move the selection with Control+Shift (Command + Shift on Mac), isn’t it enough?
You loose precision when dragging freely, as you sometimes want to go back exactly where you were prior to moving the selection. Use case:
At position 6 s 176 ms I have a 367 ms selection. Now I want to quickly go back to 5 s 075 ms and copy 367 ms from there. Then I want to go back to 6 s 176 ms and paste what I copied there. I often want to do this when working with chopped up loops and beats.
Yes, I can eg. create region markers for current selection, then Control-Shift-drag to somewhere else and copy, then Control-Shift-drag back to original position (the region) and paste; and finally delete those region markers if I don’t want them there.
That process could be shortened dramatically by having a keyboard shortcut to move selection backwards or forwards, by the same increment as the selection length.
In a rhythm loop, let’s say 2 bars with 16 beats where all the beats occur at regular intervals, this is especially useful for duplicating particular beats to multiple places.
Actually, I like this idea and it’s easy to implement. There’s a good chance to see it in the next WaveLab version.