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.

"Man from Harlem" remix

In my attempts to learn Soundtrack Pro, part of the  Final Cut Studio package that Apple used to sell for sound editing, I've gone back to this video with friend Gary Lettan - who can really put on a performance. Some fun, basic effects have been added.

Oh my. STP as it's known on the message boards. What an annoying POS. Even after reading the Apple published "Sound Editing in Final Cut Studio", I still can barely find my way around. The only commands that it shares with Final Cut are use of the J, K, & L keys and the space bar. It's not even obvious where the focus is while working in various panes. Selection works nothing like it does in FCP. The functionality of the File Editor pane at the bottom of the screen is completely counter intuitive. As far as I can tell, envelopes cannot be applied to single files, but work only in the multi track window. Roundtripping to/from FCP works as it should, but the file saving process is about as obtuse as could be imagined. I'm only hanging on with this application because of the huge variety of effects that it has that cannot be done directly in FCP. Perhaps a few hundred more hours and I'll make it far enough up the curve to be able to do something productive. It's frustrating enough that the Adobe alternative begins to look like a wise choice, especially since Apple has abandoned the entire Final Cut suite.

But then it's starting all over again at the bottom of the hill.