Might As Well

get up and work on something, rather than lying in bed awake considering all the possibilities. Which leaves me sitting at a keyboard wondering which direction to take instead of reclining on a mattress. The last, likely alternative prior to becoming vertical, was a revisitation of the last topic of anguish immediately below: the barrier to entry into the software known as Soundtrack Pro.

Nearly a month after my last rant on the subject, during which I've chipped away at that wall, I think it can be reported that some progress has been made. Nonetheless, the functionality still appears erratic, limited, and mostly opaque.

A month ago, the primary frustration was not being able to uncover the means to utilize envelopes a.k.a. keyframes a.k.a. automation in the File Editor module. It's buried somewhere in the Help files, but that source didn't yield the information. Merely poking around the interface finally revealed the minute button that controls the envelope graph. But then it was another 8 - 10 hours of poking and probing that uncovered the logical necessity that Effects cannot be automated without first creating points on the envelopes. It was an hour or more before it became obvious that when automating five to eight variables at a time, all to coincide with one another, all the points on those different envelopes needed to be in line with one another. And the only way to do that is to zoom way in and then turn on the snap feature.

Apply a stored, user preset from one of the EQ effects? Oh yeh. It can be done. But it's going to take several hours to figure it out. Because I doubt I could explain it.

So my complaint? That the software gets in the way all too frequently.