after playing with the current state of spectral editing i have as few thoughts. first, it's great. really appreciate it. just the spectrogram view is really helpful. having editorial functionality just makes it that much better. that said, i find there to be two main issues for the way i work with this. i came to reaper from samplitude, which has had spectral editing for a very long time.
the addition of spectral editing adds a large new dimension to the workflow and needs to be matched with capable navigation and selection tools. i just tried some cleanup of an old piece of soundtrack, trying to remove some music that is woven through dialog. i enlarged my item to fullscreen but still had a huge amount of dead space in the upper frequencies taking up my view and making fine selection difficult. since there is already an ability to draw a selection box around frequency ranges, perhaps something like this could be used for 'view' in order to zoom in and display only a certain range. that would make fine selection far easier. another option might be a scrollbar and zoom option so the spectrogram could be zoommed in on and scrolled up and down to different ranges.
the second issue i ran into was the rotating control knobs at the side of the selection box. once i got several areas stacked in various positions, i found these control knobs to be inferfering with each other. perhaps some kind of pop-up control window could be implemented that would only appear when a selected area is active or hovered over? this kind of design is not my area of expertise but it was something of an issue.
lastly and kind of pie-in-the-sky would be something like graphics-oriented selection tools, the ability to draw irregular selection areas by placing and moving points, a pen tool, variable lasso (rectangle, circle, ellipse), or brush tool.
all of the above would have greatly enhanced my ability to work with my test clip. in that example i could clearly see specific bands of musical tones but, due to the lack of navigation tools above, could not easily select for the specific tones as they appeared very much squashed together, and this at full screen.
maybe some of this is already there and was just something i missed but i did try a lot of click/r-click cominations with lots of modifiers. i did find the ability to use a modifier with the up/down arrows to intensify the spectrogram display. that was very cool.
thanks and can't wait to see how this all develops,
BabaG
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