Recently we were asked, if volume-editing is possible, as it is possible in the audio-software "Hindenburg" and we got sent this gif, which shows how it's done and how convenient and "cleaned up" it looks.
So I would share this gif and make some requests, that could allow doing this.
First, here's the gif:
What you can see are three things basically:
1) It shows the peaks underneath the volume-envelope.
2) You can add new draggable envelope-points quite easily within a time-selection.
3) It allows adding a new "drag-envelope point", which allows dragging the volume between a two envelope-points.
Let's go into more detail:
1) Showing the peaks underneath the volume-envelope is really awesome. Especially if mostly edit items and work with volume, it looks real cleaned-up. You can immediately see, where the volume-envelope is at a given point, just because it is displayed underneath it.
This would be awesome to have in Reaper too, even if it's probably only feasible for volume and not other envelopes and probably only for rectified peaks.
It makes the whole thing readable much better, which is very helpful for those, who work with a lot of audio with high dynamics, who are controlled by volumne-env.
Podcasts, Audiobooks, stuff with loud and silent voices, which needs partial volume-control, would benefit from it.
I think it should be only with item-volume-envelopes, so dragging, copying and pasting around the item with all it's volume-envelopepoints wouldn't be a problem.
2) You can see in the gif, that there's a way of easily adding two envelope-points within a time-selection, who act like a "fadein" and "fadeout"-envelope-point. This would be cool to have as a mouse-modifier, so be able to click into a time-selection and it creates these fadein/fadeout-envelope-points in relation to the time-selection start and end.
An option in the prefs would be neccessary to set these default fadein/fadeouts, as they probably differ from the lengths of item fadein/fadeout.
3) The dragging these fadein/fadeout-envelope-points could be easily done with another dragging mousemodifier. You put it at, let's say, CMD+Leftdrag and, when you click inbetween two envelope-points with CMD+Leftdrag, you can move the next envelopepoint left and right from the clickpoint in unison. it would make controlling the volume-envelope much faster without having to actively select two envelope-points time and again.
This would make a lot of editing and volume-control much easier.
I hope I could explain, what I see as benefits in this gif. When I first saw it, I felt like "Yeah, this is so obviously easier for quick editing, why didn't I think about that before?"
Hindenburg in general is known to be the best and quickest audio-editor used by many radio-broadcasters and radio-journalists worldwide and they try to make these editing workflows for features, iinterviews, etc as fast as possible, so journalists can make their interviewedits done for a show done in thirty minutes.
And the stuff in the gif is one of the things that makes it a workhorse for editing.
Volume-Envelope-Management as in Hindenburg
Linear Mode
