Ive been a long time WL user and only really started useing SL a little while back but for most of my editing, Id like to do it in SL now.
BUT
I make a selection and just want to adjust the edges. In WL you hold the mouse over the edge and simply drag it…am I missing something here? With time selected etc there are add and subtract shortcuts but no simply adjustment of edges?
Additionally, simply double clicking between markers would select between the 2 markers
It’s not possible to drag the edges of a selection.
You have to use shift to expand or add to the selection or alt (if on Mac) to contract or subtract from the selection.
Dragging the edges would be more elegant and more conventional.
Ok Thanks
I saw that in the manual but hoping it included convention too.
Yeah that is very frustrating; its conventional on so many, if not all audio editors I know of (as well as decades of editing) as well as the convention in most Steiny programs eg all range selections in cubase, nuendo, wavelab
Would be nice if they at least allow an option :-/ Most vendors keep a consistent UI experience
Agreed 100% - Caught me out again the other day, ‘instinctively’ went to enlarge a selection by grabbing the edges, but forgetting you can’t do this (yet.!) . Would be a very helpful workflow improvement…
I believe the reason why you can’t grab and drag a selection edge is because there are many forms of selection in SL, and apart from Time Range and Frequency Range selections there is not much sense in dragging edges in most of them. They have irregular shapes that are frequently directly related to the audio material, and scaling a shape doesn’t make sense with them. Not to mention that you can have multiple selections that are not connected to each other.
Then people would complain that selection adjustment is not consisten across selection types, or that they want to drag harmonics selection upwards to make it thicker but can’t. Or that when they drag the weird shape they made with wand or brush selection the scaling is not how they expect, etc. etc. etc. You know how it goes.
The way it is makes everything work the same way, and it makes perfect sense. You just have to get used to using the modifier keys and thinking about it as adding to (or taking from) your selections, instead of stretching them around.
as usual, great post @henrique_staino 
I’ll just add here for those who might not know/ remember
the default key command for “re-select” is ctrl+shift+D
(thanks to @Joey_Kapish for showing me this)
which is probably my most used key command
As Henrique says: getting to grips with the Tool Settings Replace/Add/Subtract/Intersect setting is key to using SL…If I could set the default to “Add” for every tool, that would be my preference
Great info here @henrique_staino but I beg to differ
I just think its beneficial to not stay in the framing of SL for selection. Its just amazing that we have come so far but it makes me feel like Im on one of the first versions of photoshop and its painful doing stuff this way…the photoshop graphic paradigm is powerful but why not keep to well formed and mature conventions?
Sizing of selections in PS does not involve any ambiguity; extensions of selection areas only apply to rectilinear forms as is the case in standard steinberg packages like Wavelab. This provides a wider compatibility with decades of other use cases
Then there is the ergonomic aspect; Magnetic lasso (during freeform tracing) removes much of the tension in the mouse hand and a qualifier can step through predetermined resolutions of tolerance
The masking/selections using ranges and wand tool really make the selection tools in SL feel very awkward because they are still in very early development
What is helpful is knowing what is in the outside world and has been for many years of development. Coupled with the needs of audio selection and masking is the key…try masking out eg hair with a couple of clicks and the counterpart of eg the drips mentioned in the other post Tips for denoising? (Unmix levels counterpart)
The more we spend months in editing, the more it tells us about the importance of source and spontaneity in music…these tools (ie SL, Melodyne etc) are meant to be adjuncts (in music anyway) whereby we make things clearer/better and/or create, else we suffer the dehumanising perfectionism eg like ironing every crease out of human pitch variance which is why the robotics of current music production (vs art) is becoming vomitus and sterile (but of course exceptions, ymmv)
We also train the upcoming generations to be product conscious rather than art.
Just my 2c…its good use the well trodden expectations of graphic counterpart and the maturity that may be outside our own perspective of sitting in front of our monitor…Im just as guilty
Many of us are not working on music…many of us who do SL music editing are waiting for new developments…it is just where we currently are at this time…I’m in both of those camps
I don’t know how much music @henrique_staino does in SL…I know henrique does plenty documentary film audio work in SL in ARA.
I have toyed with some of my original music from the past in SL; I don’t find SL a must have for music…unless you want to remove some unwanted vocals…otherwise, SL11 unmix modules for music aren’t yet capable enough for me at this time
for my film work? SL is an absolute must
hair? you mean in vision?
I mean, @Robin_Lobel is not Adobe…Steinberg is the storefront for SL afaiaa
If unmixing music was as important as PS and the other Adobe stable was back in the day, then there would be massive, highly funded teams creating the unmix editor softwares…as it is, most of the unmixing “apps” are free algos in free hosts…or very inexpensive apps or online apps
Lets consider another issue, sound is 11 times more complicated than visual light; it’s just a physical fact…and we might have to wait a bit longer for sound deconstruction software to catch-up to visual editing software. How about the quality of an image and deconstructing that? Can PS take and 8 bit image and render said image to a 16bit or higher raw? I don’t know and I’m pretty sure this is in development. How about converting tiny dvi films to 4K (and beyond)? It’s in development at the mo…how good will it be? We’ll have to wait and see.
I realize you are talking about SL selection tools. How long have you been using SL? How about PS?
I mean, in SL11 the Transfer Tool was the new big addition…and that was in August 2024…
I’d say if you want something specific from Robin, then start a thread compelling enough to convince him your missing tool is really a SL requirement
I probably got SL for all the wrong reasons. I just looked at the steiny demos and SL seemed to be exactly what I was looking for;
eg
I have always enjoyed a minimal micing of a drumkit. A stereo R88 in the right spot is nothing less than amazing (except for metal and heavy rock). The issue is that depending on the player, you have to deconstruct the stereo take and take some of the stems to get power and punch. Normally this involves using a multiband deconstruct, some serious gating right?
So when I saw the demo showing unmix of drums, I was immediately sold
HOWEVER
In reality, it is VERY limited in my use case. I gave up on trying to get anything decent…its just nothing like the results on the demo and maybe I just dont get SL. Either way, Im just spending more time at the source but being able to use SL in the way I thought it could have been used would have been amazing
I get a lot of work doing singer/guitarist (acoustic). There is something so magic about a great simultaneous take but getting a stereo take (so you feel like you are there) and balancing the 2 elements in post can be tricky (actually almost impossible). Point source micing is the only real quality method with solid imaging. Multi mics have phase…always…and F8 in blumlein using nulls is the best control but is still very flat image
SO
I would have thought unmixing the very simple stream of a voice and guitar would be easy but it just sounds like rubbish…no usable results
I am talking about ideal outcomes here…sure you can get ok which is all I can do and I have listened to a lot of reference tracks but they all have those compromises which would be nice to improve upon…but SL is not currently it. This would be the most helpful tool I could have for those jobs…even if it only did that properly it would be worth it to me
Yeah I just mean how quickly you can do selections using the “Drips” example…
I dont do any film audio post in general so yes, completely diff planets…was just hopeful it was a tool that would really benefit a music workflow but I dont umix or extract vox…just as a cleanup or adjunct production tool
So far in the year I have had it, I have spent probably 100 hours learning it. I have done 1 thing reasonably successful which was the Drips cleanup which I could have done in 10 mins in wavelab…so Im probs just wasting my time
Hey!
yeah, from your description it seems to me that SL is not the right tool for the job.
To be very honest - and this is just my opinion of course- I can’t fathom thinking that the best way to get a good drum sound (in this day and age at least) is to record it with just one mic and then doing a bunch of deconstructing and processing and reconstructing. Same goes for the singer/guitarist. I feel this is a complete inversion of the process - for at least another 10 years. Let me make it clear: I’m not criticizing your thought process per se, I just don’t think the technology is there yet.
Of course two mics have phase issues, but there are much easier ways of solving them than the way you’re trying to take here. After differen’t mic placements untill you get the sound you want, you can try tools like Auto Align or even Auto Align Post to solve any further issues.
But if you record with minimal micing in the hopes of getting a more natural and clean unprocessed result, you can’t hope that getting that recording and throwing a bunch of processing that are at the forefront of what is possible to do with audio, on the verge on being experimental, is the way to get there.
All these unmixing tools are usable for very subtle remixing, for experimentation, or for “salvage” work, like there’s stuff you need to recover so they are usable. But never ever for stuff so delicate and exposed like the cases you described.
I believe that in the future it will be possible to do what you want. Like just record it anyhow and then throw a few modules on it and there you have it, a perfect recording.
But this is definitely not the case right now, and definitely not in SL.
It would seem not
I appreciate your response…Im not offended too easily anyway
Ive been recording for over 40 years. I make do with the current standard techniques and they are ok but a long way from what is ideal. Remember its not just the instrument(s) but rather the space and air is what seems to give true connection. I cannot find a single ref track of singer/guitarist that does not sound mono (in its nearfield). This can only be reasonably achieved using (for voice) MS technique so that panned movements can be easily controlled ie head tilt etc. This creates almost ASMR feel and is so connecting.
Secondly, great acoustic guitar also requires a 2 mic approach to be even close to connecting else it sounds very amateurish. Either MS, sometimes XY but most often spaced omni or spot and room technique.
Here is an example ref track in combination spaced and spot/room (genre is irrelevant)
You just cant, ime do this without serious compromises for a solo artist
So the ideal would be 2 stereo tracks incorporating the air/space. Ideally a separate version for HRTF listening
A lot more to it really…imo
For true coincident stereo on 2 sources its actually 4 mics. On top of that, the maths itself tells us that any phase alignment is a rather large compromise…the modulus are varying fundamentals does not allow this. Most peeps think in terms of phase for multi mic drumkits…but this is not entirely true, you only look to phase align the transients as the rest of different components all drift into varying comb filtering. Im not trying to do the normal stuff…I have done that for decades…what Im trying to do is something different and audiophile capable. Alignment and heavy post processing is not what Im after even though it may seem the case.
eg I NEVER use more than 1 fundamental transient from a source eg 2 mics on kick, only 1 is ever used and anything else is thrown away below 100hz. Pure and exclusive presence between eg kick and bass can ever live in that region. I use tactile monitoring in that region and you can tell it in an instant. ie crowding because of the floppiness in feel. I do have a bit of a laugh when I play back some “expert” EDM tracks with layered kicks. The great EDM tracks obey this exclusive zone and you cant cheat physics.
Take drums: I was first inspired very early on by the 3 mic technique for Zeppelin but mainly because it treated the drum kit as a whole instrument. Um it did require a great sounding instrument to start with though. Then I got pulled into the multi mic craziness of the 80s. I listen back now..its vomitous but thats why the SL demo worked in that scenario. I was influenced when I heard the PIL album in late 80s and the drums went the other way where the kit was mic’d differently and there was a full picture stereo image of the kit that set up the soundstage so effectively; multi mics only played minimal support roles. Thats where Im at, still but I simply use the mics for support and gating/sidechaining. The mix comes from the skill of the drummer and the spontaneous moment that is captured. Its 90% of the sound but I like to take that one step further that just a pure capture and manipulate elements using an unmix of the kit; not as a main thing for ear candy
Yeah its tough. Haydn is the example I follow. Im just covering stuff I did when I was 23…no one got it then and always felt alien…but now is the time, going anonymous and letting the music speak I still have the hardware etc from them and 40 years of producing experience so its a lot of fun…but yeah I dont think SL is going to help me unfortunately.
Im def not looking to AI remix…doesnt need us humans anyway…just look at what Spotify is doing…its mimicking the real the human recording that it will find tough