Bring back the dead (features) please

Question

I'm currently working on a large (>10G) studio recording for a cultural restoration, and I'm being driven to distraction by a couple of things that have been mentioned in passing in other forums/user areas. Because it's such an important piece of audio material, I have to work entirely manually, and the one repetitive task that I'm doing (800 so far today, and about 7,000 or so more) is the one feature that's missing from AA2/3.
These are small glitches in an otherwise great package (I'm not ******** about Adobe, I promise!), and they're so easily fixable even I could do it.
But just to put in black and white what I miss most from previous versions, and what I'd really like to see offered pr considered in future iterations:
1) I need to be able to play preroll/selection/to end of file. Since the "Play from selection to EOF" has been taken out from AA2 onwards, I'm spending (wasting!) an enormous amount of time editing tiny transients, then scrolling back 1-3 seconds, then clicking to place the cursor, then pressing play to verify the repair and continue on to the next transient. Since my display window width is typically 1.1 - 3 seconds, and I work mainly in spectral view, this is extremely time-consuming and truly, truly annoying. Do this 500 times on a single recording, for 10-15 recordings per week, and it actually subtracts
i hours
from the work week!
Not everyone will use this, but some of us relied on this time-saving and practical feature and really miss it; and yes, it would probably need to be a configuration option, not just an extra context menu setting to confuse other users.
2) Please, please, please fix the gui so the Adobe window controls library doesn't keep trashing everyone else's windows. Initially this seemed to be caused by a Microsoft mouse driver problem, but I've now tried a number of alternatives, and none of them work when Audition is running.
The workaround is to minimise Audition instead of working over the top, but that's not a fix, that's a workaround. I know everyone loves the pretty dimple controls and cute tabs and little x's, but they're non-standard, and they don't even work within Audition without snarfing normal windows controls up. (Try opening a save dialog when the underlying Audition toolbar suddenly paints itself over the dropdown controls. Or worse, when I'm about to drop an object in an unrelated application, Audition suddenly hiccups and paints over the other application's device context!)
This isn't a mouse driver compatibility issue, it's a bug in the implementation of the window controls library (MSVCL/MSVCR?) used by Adobe -
i all
Adobe products suffer from it, and
i only
Adobe products suffer from it, although they affect any other application using the same library. This is a bug in the way the Adobe applications use the library, not necessarily in the library itself. Why? Because all other applications that use the same library
b don't
paint over one another's contexts. So it should be fixable by Adobe, and if so, please fix it!
3) Please look at BWF/CART chunk "usability" improvements.
For example, it would be really useful to be able to instantly clear BWF/CART/RIFF text fields without having to manually clear them all (click, drag/ctrl-A, delete, next field) when preparing an audio file for downsampling and mastering. The RIFF text in some fields is preserved even when "Save non-audio data" is turned OFF during a save, so just saving without extra data isn't a practical workaround. And yes, that did happen in the few days I was able to test AA3, but I can't confirm it because AA3 won't allow me to finish trialing it.
On the same subject, some other small "usability" fixes to the metadata field tab order and the ability to preset reasonable defaults in some fields (for example, adding the current file length to the start cue to provide an accurate EOD cue instead of 2099-mm-dd would be a nice addition) would be much appreciated.
Th

Answer 1

>Since the "Play from selection to EOF" has been taken out from AA2 onwards...
Well, I don't understand this one at all, because nothing's been removed. There never has been a
selection to EOF option - it's always been cursor to EOF, and it's still there. All that has happened is that the play options have been expanded, not replaced. In 1.5, there were the first four options on the list, and in 2.0 they were added to.
As far as I'm concerned, what you want to do exists right now and works fine. Right-click on the play button, select 'play preroll, postroll and selection, and you can play through your edit perfectly - and in the options, set up just as much pre and postroll as you want. So if you use, say, the healing brush, then the extent of this becomes the 'selection', and you hear either side of it, and that's all. Is this what you want to be able to do?
Unfortunately (perhaps...), Adobe never, ever, discuss future plans for what to include with anybody. No, not even the beta testers. It's hard enough trying to get features altered so that they work sensibly, never mind trying to get new ones added. What happens is that Adobe looks at what is written in features forums (there are two sensible ones, here and at AudioMasters), and picks what they want out of them. And very occasionally David Johnson comes up with something totally amazing, usually a bit left-field, that nobody would have thought of in 1000 years, and that gets added too - probably because he's written all the code for it! And if there's anything in the aforementioned feature lists that coincides with what they want to do - well, that's a bonus, isn't it?
I don't mind this approach, because Audition does pretty much what I want it to do anyway - especially now that the crossfades have got sorted out - and hey, you get the occasional surprise. But in principle I agree with your plea for not removing existing features, or altering them out of all recognition; somebody somewhere was probably using them, and it will hack them off somewhat. There are three that come to my mind specifically here, but there may well be others as well. If it's any cause for hope I don't know, but
one of them has been put back; the play list option.