I have been playing around with the CD audio montage layout using the 2 track staggered approach. One big shortcoming of WL is when I want to change the order in a track when in a staggered layout.
Is there a way to adjust the running order without having to mess around manually moving each clip back into place? What I really want is to select a clip - move it up and have the clip in front of that one move down. Right now - it’s a mess and I find I waste a ton of time trying to re-stagger everything all the time.
Sure - it would be nice to bring everything in - in the correct order to start with - but for these CD mixes - I am playing around with clip positioning a lot before deciding on my final layout.
I found the staggered approach only interesting with albums where some songs came from a different production and needed some identical effects/EQ/dynamics - hence, track effects. Otherwise it will be messy, even when dragging clip names in the list (and they won’t be staggered anymore obviously).
I guess I’m used to the staggered approach from the old days of CD Architect, and I also worked on a lot of punk albums where if the songs didn’t already slightly overlap, the band usually asked for it so I liked to be set up and ready for a slight overlap at any time.
It’s true that dragging the clip names in the Clip Tab will create a not perfectly staggered montage but also in the Clip Tab is an easy to manage column to choose what track a clip is on, so it’s not too hard to re-stagger if needed.
I’ve often thought to request a “Re-Stagger” option but usually it’s pretty fast/easy to do it manually in the Clip Tab.
Gave WL a try on a 10 track mix and it was a mess to try and re-position everything.
Decided to stay with Studio One for the actual track assembly portion of my mix CDs. It does “auto-stagger” on the fly - regardless of where a track is positioned in the running order. If I move a track from position 12 to position 2 - everything restaggers perfectly.
Will continue to use WL for LUFS batch processing and some other minor things on the source material.
I guess I should mention that before I insert the files into a montage, I use the pop up Insert Audio Files Box to quickly determine the initial order of clips, it’s very fast to do with the up and down arrows plus COMMAND on your keyboard.
For me it’s not so common to have a track listing change once I start a mastering project and when I do, it’s just moving one song here or there, definitely nothing major, but I suppose if for some reason you regularly have to change the track order by dragging clips around, it could be a mess in WaveLab.