Per you are right that the word cut has an invisible sibling called paste, and we’ve not at all been talking about Pasting anything we’ve cut yet (though wouldn’t that be interesting).
In Ableton we do have Cut, which (predictably) cuts content; but we also have Cut Time, which does exactly what we are talking about here: eliminates a section of time and joins the remaining bits together.
So I very much disagree about the use of Erase for such a feature - Erase, to continue the tape metaphor, removes content but not time or media.
We erase all the time already by turning feedback to zero while a loop is running right?
Trim has connotations from the video world - shortening a clip by defining new start and stop points within the existing clip.
Truncate has the connotation of leaving off the ending of a sentence… this may be more akin to those Mobius operations that cut content and time from the switch point to end of loop?
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So yes cut and paste would be fun, but what we're looking for is simply the opposite of Stutter or the opposite of Insert, so should be named accordingly - probably best are Unsert, Cut, or Remove in my opinion. While Stutter and Insert make the loop longer, this feature would, by the same mechanism and rules, make the loop shorter - it’s a bookend symmetry :)
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Phil :)
On most DAWs this process is called "cut". Sometimes "global cut", in case the command is to affect several tracks. In a DAW the CUT process brings the snippet into the buffer so you can paste in somewhere else on the music's time line and this is different from live looping. In live looping we just want to annihilate a slice, get rid of it for ever, and splice together the two cuts seamlessly.
CUT is not fully descriptive, but it is short and does not interfere with other existing processes in live looping. Has anyone suggested ERASE? The word itself implies that it's not about deleting the whole shebang, so therefore I think ERASE is just as good as CUT. Maybe ERASE is a snip better, since it can't fool anyone into erroneously think that it is about the usual cut-and-paste that we use every day with computers (ctr/cmd X).
We do cut out a snippet in live looping but only to annihilate that slice and not to paste it in somewhere.
If comparing with traditional DAW sampling vocabulary (that draws on the tape cutting and splicing at IRCAM by the late fifties and on) we also have TRIM and TRUNCATE that a.f.a.i.k. mean the same, in essence the exact opposite to the process we're talking about in this thread.
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But HEY - here's an idea for yet another very useful live looping process! Maybe some nifty programmer can create a live looping function for CUT-AND-PASTE that works like a linked pair of CUT and INSERT? Scramble in LP1 does that by random and in Mobius we have scripting support for random and musically systematic cut-n-insert. Many times when playing I have been missing the option to kick a pedal to cut out a sub cycle (and have the gap spliced together) and then kick another pedal (or the same if using a dual command button switch) to have the loop cut, widened and the snipped pasted in right there. Strange that it doesn't exist in any existing looper yet, isn't it? I do it a lot when editing recordings but it would be so fun to cut and paste in real-time on looping audio.
. ... Greetings from Sweden
Per Boysen www.perboysen.com http://www.youtube.com/perboysen
On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 10:21 AM, andy butler <akbutler@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
Matthias Grob wrote:
so what should Unsert do then? :-)
I thought
Unsert = opposite of Insert
but only if
Undo = opposite of Do
maybe better to say
"Outsert" for taking out a a piece of time from the loop.
what about
Indo
Undont
andy
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