iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Dragging Regions

You can change when a region plays by shifting its horizontal position. Just drag it by its center.

Dragging is a very handy tactic. When you drag a region horizontally, you make it play earlier or later in time. When you drag it vertically, you move it to a different track.

Figure 25-2. When you double-click any region, the Track Editor appears at the bottom of the window. One key feature is the Track Name box, where you can type a new name for the region. Press Return or Enter to make the name stick.(Try not to worry about the inconsistency of having to edit the region’s name so far away from the region itself.)

Figure 25-3. This pop-up menu determines how fine or how coarse the underlying drag-and-drop grid is. It lists basic musical rhythmic units, from largest to smallest (that is, slowest to quickest). In 4/4 time, a region will snap only to the beginnings of measures if you choose “1/1 Note” (that is, a whole note); it’ll move much more freely if you choose “1/16 Note” (a sixteenth note).

And when you select a huge chunk of your song (Figure 25-1), you can rearrange huge chunks of your piece at once.