For along time it was debatable as to whether a two-button mouse was worth having when working with Pro Tools. However since Digidesign introduced v7.2HD and 7.3 LE right-click enhancements have appeared all over the place and now each new feature seems to be making full use of that second button on your mouse or trackball. So in this month’s workshop we are going to look at what you can do with that right hand mouse button. Remember that Control-Click in the Mac Pro Tools world was equivalent to right-clicking. This is now not the case. Control-clicking can do different things to right-clicking now.

Edit Window

Region

Right Clicking on a region now brings up a contextual menu. Most of these options are available to you elsewhere in Pro Tools but the great advantage of these right-click features is that they offer these options right under your fingertips.

Cut, Copy, Paste, & Clear – These all duplicate the functions in the Edit menu.

Matches - Alternatives

After recording multiple takes with loop or punch recording, you can replace the take currently on a track with one of the other takes. This only works if each region has an identical start time. You can select and audition alternate takes from the Matches popup menu whilst the session plays or loops.

Matches - Channels

When working with audio files imported from a field recorder, you can this feature to replace a mono region on a track with a matching segment of an alternate channel that was recorded simultaneously. Any fades performed on the original region are automatically recalculated against the replacement region, and any pre-existing automation on that track is left unchanged. The details of this feature are complex and if you want more information then I would suggest you start by reading the Field Recorders Workflow guide which you should find the Documentation folder in the Digidesign folder in your Applications folder.

Separate – This is the same as Separate Region in the Edit menu usually Command+E (Mac) or Control+E (Windows)

Delete Fades – This enables you to delete a fade region and becomes active when you have made a fade selection.

Snap to Next & Snap to Previous – These work in a similar way to Shuffle and are very useful especially when you don’t want to use Shuffle edit. Take a look at this screen shot, which shows a vocal track I am editing. 

If I right-click on the middle region and select Snap to Next you will see that it has snapped to the next region to the right, something you could never do with Shuffle! 

Conversely Snap to Previous will move the middle region to the region to the left, which is what you would expect to happen when moving a single region using Shuffle. Right-Clicking a region with the Selector Tool used to enable you to scrub with the cursor.  To do this now you must Control-click (Mac) or Start-Click (Windows).

Spot – This brings up the normal Spot Region dialog box.

Group Regions & Ungroup Regions – These enable you to create and undo region groups from a selection and are the same as Group and Ungroup in the Region menu.

Loop and Unloop – These enable you to create, remove, or flatten region loops and are the same as Loop and Unloop in the Region menu.

Expand to Tracks – This is another feature that comes into its own when you have multi-channel tracks acquired using a field recorder. Again for more info go to the Field Recorder Workflow guide.

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