User Manual

CHAPTER
525
45 Selecting
OVERVIEW
Before you can edit anything in Digital Performer,
you must first select it. Digital Performer provides
many useful and powerful ways to make selections.
After you’ve made a selection, you can apply
Digital Performer’s many powerful Edit menu and
Region menu commands to whatever is selected.
This chapter shows you the many convenient ways
to select data in Digital Performer. Except where
noted, these techniques apply to any type of data
(MIDI, audio, conductor track, automation, etc.)
Selection basics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 525
The View Filter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 526
Choosing a Pointer tool selection mode . . . . . . . . . . . . 526
Selecting events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 527
Selecting a time range . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529
Smart Selections. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 534
SELECTION BASICS
There are three ways to make selections in Digital
Performer:
■ Event selection — Selects specific events
■ Time range selection — Selects a region of time,
regardless of what is in the region
■ Use the Search command to make selections
based on time- and event-based search criteria
Selecting events
Event selection involves clicking (or dragging over)
events in one Digital Performer’s edit windows.
The events become highlighted to indicate they are
selected, and they can then be edited or otherwise
modified.
Selecting a time range
A time range selection spans a certain period of
time in one or more tracks, regardless of what data
is in the region. In fact, time range selections can
even be empty. For example, you could select four
empty measures and actually copy them into the
Clipboard — perhaps to splice the empty space
somewhere in a track. Or, you could select two
empty measures at the beginning of a track and
then use the Snip command to remove them and
move up everything else in the track to replace
them.
Time range selections are always affected by Digital
Performer’s Smart Selections feature, which has an
important impact on what happens when you
make selections. So be sure to read “‘Smart’
Boundaries on Time Range Selections” on
page 535.
Using the Search command
The Search command lets you select data by
criteria— or rules —that you specify. For
information about using the Search command, see
chapter 46, “Searching” (page 539).
Edit operations that require time range
selection
There are a few commands in the Edit menu and
Region menu that require time range selection:
Snip, Repeat, Paste Repeat, Merge Repeat and
Retrograde. These commands wouldn’t be able to
do anything useful without a clearly defined end
time for the selection, which event selections don’t
provide. Therefore, these commands are grayed
out if the current selection is an event selection. To
use them, make a time range selection as shown
later on in “Selecting a time range” on page 529.