iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Editing Real Instrument Regions

When it comes to editing, Real Instrument regions don’t offer nearly as much flexibility as Software Instruments. Real Instrument regions are digital recordings of live performances; you can’t very well correct a wrong note, boost the emphasis of a sung word, shift the performance in pitch, draw in new notes, or have any of the kind of fun described in Chapter 26.

Still, as Chapter 25 makes clear, you can massage any kind of region—Real or not—in a number of useful ways. You can chop them up, rejoin them, drag them around in time, copy and paste them, and so on.

Figure 27-6. By zooming in, you gain incredible precision in selecting portions that you intend to cut or copy.Note, however, that if you can’t use this zoomed-in view for the purpose of positioning the Playhead to split a region unless you’ve turned on Playhead synchronization. To do that, make sure that the button circled here shows two aligned Playheads; if not, click there!

If you double-click a blue or purple region, in fact, you behold the sight in Figure 27-6: actual audio waveforms that make it very easy to isolate certain notes or syllables. You’ve just opened the Track Editor for a Real Instrument region. (If you’ve clicked a blue track to select it, you can open the corresponding Track Editor in any of three other ways: Choose Control → Show Editor, press

-E, or click the button below ...