Locate to Next/Previous Event

The next little gem in navigation is locating by event boundaries. When you have many events on one track, you can move the cursor back and forth to each event boundary by using the B and N keys. Notice that these are just beneath the G and H keys for zooming. Here’s how it works.

Let’s take the CD track example and cut the event into several pieces and move them apart from one another so it looks something like what is shown in Figure 5.11.

1. Now make sure that track is the selected track. This only works for the selected track.

2. Select the first event.

Figure 5.11 CD track cut into smaller events.

3. Press L to locate to the start of that selection.

4. Press N to move the cursor to the next event boundary.

5. Press N again and repeat to move the cursor to all the event boundaries in the track. When you come to the end, pressing N will no longer do anything. (See Figure 5.12.)

Figure 5.12 Cursor has moved to the end of the first event.

6. Now press B to step backward through the same points. If Auto-Scroll is on, each time you move the cursor, just the audio will move underneath.

I use this to step through the edits made to tom-tom tracks in a rock mix. Being able to jump quickly to the edited toms makes tweaking them much faster. ADR tracks in film work might have a sparse number of events on each track. Using B and N to step through these events can speed up locating them over long stretches of time without zooming out.

If more than one track is selected in the track list, these key commands will tab through the event boundaries of all the events across all the selected tracks. Again, working with tom tracks, this comes in handy. Select all the tom tracks and tab through each hit regardless of which track it is on.