Potential manual improvements

SpectraLayers
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Worked my way through _most of the manual, and besides the Tools sections that we’ve already discussed, the following minor issues pop out for me…

p13. Use the Zoom tool at the top of the tools bar on the left to change the magnification of the spectral display.

It’s at the bottom of the tools panel (at least on Mac)

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p14. Click the Frequency Selection tool in the Tools toolbar. Move your mouse around the spectral display and see how the tool snaps to the different frequencies in the spectral display: the frequency under the tool is highlighted.

Until I click/drag, the only selection visible is a tiny vertical line close to the cursor. If I click (as the text suggests) I only get a very small selection. (Thickness: 5 pixels; Tracking Limit: 8s).
I get the impression from the manual that when I click I should see the frequency I’m about to select extend in time to the right of the cursor. That’s what the image in the manual suggests.

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p37 (& elsewhere). Intersect with Selection: Intersect the new selection with the current selection (or press Shift + Alt ).

This might need more explanation. It looks to me that it gives you the selection you make and clears everything else (if you select an unselected area), or only the bit where the new selection overlaps a previous selection (and clears everything else). Is that right? I’m not sure how/why one would use this.

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p42. Repair a damaged frequency
What do you mean by a “damaged” frequency and how is it repaired (what happens when it’s repaired)? How is this different from Heal?

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p52. • Operation: Choose to cast or mold the active layer with another layer.

Maybe a brief explanation of cast and mold? (I can guess mold, but not sure about cast).

That’s it! Though I haven’t worked through the process menu yet as I managed to semicrash SL by dropping a new wav file onto the Layers panel. (Semi crash in that the programme is still running, and will play audio, but the interface doesn’t respond any more.)

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Thanks for the feedback, this will definitely be clarified in the next documentation update.

On Intersect: “only the bit where the new selection overlaps a previous selection (and clears everything else)” yes.
It can be used to do a rough selection first (for instance using the brush selection or any other selection tool) and then restricting to a specific time range, or a specific frequency range by intersecting your rough selection with a time range selection or frequency range selection.

“Damaged”, as in some data are missing, a brief silent gap for instance. You can then precisely target that missing part by clicking the end of frequency A and dragging it to the beginning of frequency B, to recreate a continuous frequency:
AAAA__BBBBB
It’s more precise and targetted than using the Heal action, which mostly attempt to reconstruct background noise more than frequencies.

Casting/Molding: that’s a little tricky to just explain with words. The documentation will add pictures to better explain the concepts.
Meanwhile you can look at these youtube videos:

The first use that comes to mind (and what it was originally designed for) was to reduce overlapping frequencies between 2 tracks, to make your mix sound cleaner. But there are a lot of creative use as well.

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Thanks Robin, that makes sense and is very useful.