User manual

350
The Sample Editor
Working with hitpoints and slices
• To insert a new hitpoint, press [Alt]/[Option] and click at the position where you
want to enter the new hitpoint (i.
e. at the start of the sound).
Manually added hitpoints are locked by default.
Moving hitpoints
If a hitpoint was either placed too far away from the start of the sound or too far into
the sound, you can move it.
• To move a hitpoint, press [Alt]/[Option] and point the mouse at the vertical line of
the hitpoint. The mouse pointer changes to a double arrow and the tooltip “Move
Hitpoint” is shown. You can now drag the hitpoint to its new position.
Moved hitpoints are locked by default.
Slicing audio
Once you have set up the hitpoints as needed, you can slice the audio by clicking the
Create Slices button on the Hitpoints tab. Alternatively, you can select the “Create
Audio Slices from Hitpoints” command from the Hitpoints submenu of the Audio
menu.
The following happens:
• The Sample Editor closes.
• The audio event is “sliced” so that the sections between the hitpoints become
separate events, all referring to the same original file.
• The audio event is replaced by an audio part, containing the slices (double-click
the part to view the slices in the Audio Part Editor).
• The audio is automatically adapted to the project tempo, taking the specified
tempo or bars and beats values into account: if the event was one bar long, the
part is resized to fit exactly one bar in the Cubase tempo, and the slices are moved
accordingly, keeping their relative positions within the part.
• In the Pool, the sliced clip is shown with a different icon. Dragging the sliced clip
from the Pool to an audio track creates an audio part with the slices adapted to the
project tempo, just as above.
The audio should now play back seamlessly at the tempo set in the project!
Slices and the project tempo
The musical time base setting and the project tempo affect how the sliced audio is
played back. Make sure that the “Toggle Time Base” button in the track list or
Inspector is set to a musical time base (the button shows a note symbol – see
“Defining the track time base” on page 90). This way the loop will follow any further
tempo changes.
If the project tempo is slower than the tempo of the original audio event, there may be
audible gaps between the slice events in the part. To remedy this, you can apply the
“Close Gaps (Timestretch)” function from the Advanced submenu of the Audio menu
on the parts containing the slice events. Time stretch is applied to each slice to close
the gaps. Depending on the length of the part and the algorithm set in the Preferences
dialog (Editing–Audio page), this can take a while.
Ö If you open the Pool, you will see that new clips were created, one for each slice.
If you decide to change the tempo again after using the “Close Gaps (Timestretch)”
function, undo the Close Gaps operation or start over again, using the original,
unstretched file.
!
When you create slices, all events referring to the edited clip are also replaced.