HD24/96 Technical Reference

51

Snap and Snap-to Functions

When Snap is enabled, dragged objects such as regions or selection lines no longer move smoothly, with seemingly infinite resolution. Instead they snap to fixed time increments with magnetic allegiance - i.e. they move smoothly, but when a virtual (and invisible) grid line is crossed, they stick briefly so you’ll know you’re in line time-wise with the snap grid. Regions, region boundaries, and selection boundaries are all affected by the Snap function.

Whenever Snap is enabled, the Current Time bar is also “snap-to” point, even if it’s between grid lines.

Snap Enable

The Snap controls are found under the Options pulldown menu or from a menu that pops up when right-clicking on the time bar. Snapping is turned on or off by clicking on the SNAP button in the Drag/Edit section of the GUI Tools panel or by selecting Enable Snapping in the Options or pop-up menu. From either menu, you can select Snap to Grid, Snap to Cues, or both. You can also select the grid resolution from another pulldown under this menu.

NOTE: Enable Snapping is the on/off switch. If you want to use snapping, you must select this. It is not sufficient to select Snap to Cues or Snap to Grid by itself. If Snapping is enabled by itself, with Snap to Cues and Snap to Grid turned off, a dragged region will still snap to the Current Time bar or to the edge of an adjacent region.

Snap to Grid

The resolution of the grid is set from the Snap Grid submenu. There are both time (minutes, seconds, frames) as well as musical (bar, quarter note, eight note, etc.) increments which can be selected as grid increments. In addition, you can snap to Ruler Marks, which are the divisions along the time bar at whatever the current time scale is. This option is helpful for working within the context of the current view - for fine snap increments while zoomed in and for larger increments when zoomed out.

Time Snap resolutions are as follows:

Minute

Second

Frame

For musical applications (when working in bars beats and ticks) a tempo map can be imported from a Standard MIDI file, so that snapping to musical intervals follows tempo changes in the song. If the project is at a fixed tempo throughout, the tempo from which BBT is calculated can be set from the MIDI Setup menu as previously described. The default tempo is 120 BPM, with a fixed resolution of 480 ticks per quarter note. The BBT snap resolutions are as follows:

Bar

Half note - snap to this resolution

Half Note triplet

Quarter note

Quarter note triplet

Eighth note

Eighth note triplet