Horizontal zooming to certain value?

Getting Stuff Done Hints and Tricks
#1

First of all: Ardour 4 is a wonderful program. I’m working with it for a week and it gives me a real good flow.

I’m wondering now if there is a quick way to horizontally zoom in to a certain value, e.g. 4 bars or 10% of the project length.

When comparing different tracks or regions in a project it would be swell to have the same resolution in view for each region. For example when checking if and how much a drum track is off the actual beat.

#2

For zooming to 4 bars, set the snap to grid, and select 4 bars with the range tool, then hit z. 10% of project length is a bit more difficult I would imagine.

     Seablade
#3

Err obviously set the grid to bars in my example above as well.

     Seablade
#4

Hello Seablade,

thanks for that hint. This works quite allright. Still I thought there would be a way to pre-set the zoom-factor for doing this without selecting the 4 bars. (to save hand work). But this is just a luxury problem.

cheers,
Torsten

#5

I haven’t tested this in A4 yet, but it used to be you could save view states, where if you had, say, a particular part of the song you knew you would work with a lot, you could set a state to that and have a key combination to always get back to that exact view, but that is as close as I think I could get you sorry, and would need to test in A4 to see if that still exists in some form.

    Seablade
#6

Menu > View > Views (default keys: F1 … F12) can be used to save/restore zoom.
However currently views are not saved with the session (lost on re-start). That’s work in progress: http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=6145

#7

He Seablade and x42,

thanks for your further hints. I knew about the view state (F1 …F12) , which is not exactly what I needed, though I also thought of this first.

I needed a “portable” view state, a fixed horizontal zoom state I could use throughout the project.

Today I stumbled upon a solution: zooming out with the scroll wheel of the mouse is always a multiple of the zoom I start from. So I start with zooming in to a view I need for cutting. Than I zoom out for getting an overview (little mouse wheel scroll down) and back in (little mouse wheel scroll up), at the new point of interest.