Difficulty lining up cuts at precise spots in the audio track

Hello,
(I guess this turned into just a rant because I think "it just works that way" is really the only answer but if someone has any suggestions, I'm all ears)
I'm trying to use iMovie 11 to build a music video. I have my audio track and I'm adding clips to it that I want to position at precise spots in the music - beats, key changes, words, etc.
(First rant; I can't stand that the audio track is only as long as the amount of clips you have. I want to play the song past my last clip to help decide what clip I want to put in next - argh!!! I have to put dummy clips in the movie to make the audio play past where I'm working - insane)
Anyway, trying to line up cuts with certain spots in the audio is proving to be very frustrating. Yes, I know about beat markers but even if I put in beat markers, I can't figure out what to line up with them. Is it the trailing edge of the first clip or the leading edge of the next clip. The fact that there are gaps between the clips makes it impossible to tell where the cuts really are. It just doesn't make sense to me. Obviously, the audio and video is continuous, so what is happening in the gap? Where is the cut?
The other thing that makes it difficult is that the timeline stretches depending on the duration of a clip that is sitting on it. It seems like they do this so that they can have thumbnails that are always at least a certain size. When the duration of a clip gets short, they have to stretch the timeline because it has to be as long as the thumbnail picture. This distorts the waveform and again makes it hard to find known shapes. I can't understand this logic. The timeline should be the same scale all the way across.
The Precision Editor seems to have a mind of it's own. If I line up the cursor with a beat marker and click the clip gets trimmed way before the beat marker would indicate.
I guess I just don't get it. Does anyone else have these problems???
(end of rant)

Thanks for the reply,
What I mean about the space between clips is, on the timeline, there are visual gaps between clips. I know there aren't actual gaps in the video but visually, the clip thumbnails are separated by a gap. The audio waveform however, is displayed as continuous below the clipthumbnails. So the question is, where is the actual cut relative to the audio. Here's an example of what I'm talking about.
Those clips actually meet somewhere in relation to the audio. Where? Does the second clip start right at that rise in the wave form (just left of the beat marker) or does it start further left, right after the end of the first clip where the audio falls down? It seems like there should be a corresponding gap in the display of the audio and then it would be clear where the clips line up in relation to the audio. No?
On the length of the thumbnails thing, I know about the slider but regardless of the scale, the thumbnail pictures never get below a certain width. So, if you've got really short clips - like still frames that I want to flash in time with a quick beat - since the thumbnails don't get very narrow, iMovie has to stretch the audio waveform that runs beneath the thumbnail so that it matches the length of time of the clip. You can see this happening if you watch the timeline during playback. The playhead will be moving along smoothly but when it gets to the short clips, it will zip along much faster across those clips (because they are actually stretched relative to real-time), and then slow back down again when it gets to longer clips. The fundamental issue in my mind is that the playhead should not change speed during playback. It distorts the whole timeline and makes time comparisions of different clips nearly impossible.
Tom

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Message was edited by: thomjw

thomjw,
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Difficulty lining up cuts at precise spots in the audio track

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