Selecting Sections of the Audio Tracks

Question

I'm doing a lot of tweaking of the audio on my clips. I'm adjusting the volume levels in sections by selecting small sections of audio and moving the level up and down. This works quite nice.
But I can't seam select a smaller section between two others. For example in say a 120s clip, if I select a section at the beginning, modify it and then select a section at the end and modify it, this works. But if I then want to select a smaller section in between, I can't. iMovie selects the full clip between the two sections at the beginning and end that I have already modified. Does anyone know a way to do this?
At this point my work around is to work through the clips from start to finish. Trouble is if I miss something, I can't simply add another section, I have to undo/delete all the ones that are there and then re-add and adjust all of them.

Answer 1

Looks like I need to clarify and add some more details.
But first, I just deleted my preferences, then tried it again and still experience the same exact problem.
Here's a detailed explanation of how to reproduce what I'm seeing.
1) Create a new project.
2) Add a clip of at least 35s
3) Turn waveform view on
4) Reduce the audio level to 80% between 10-12s by:
a) Click in the audio around 10 seconds. A yellow audio selection box will appear.
b) Click to select and move the left and right edges such that you're selecting the audio from 10s to 12s.
c) Put your cursor over the level bar so the cursor changes.
d) Reduce volume of this range to 80% by clicking and moving the mouse down.
5) Reduce the audio level to 0% between 30-35s by:
a) Click in the audio around 30 seconds. A yellow audio selection box will appear.
b) Click to select and move the left and right edges such that you're selecting the audio from 30s to 35s.
c) Put your cursor over the level bar so the cursor changes.
d) Reduce volume of this range to 0% by clicking and moving the mouse down.
6) Attempt to reduce the audio level to 50% between 20-22s:
a) Click on the audio around 20 seconds.
It is at this point, I expect iMovie to show a selection range of 20-23s (assuming 3s is the default selection range). But instead it selects a range from 20-30s - the full duration between the end of the first selection and the beginning of the second selection. This is the problem.
To be clear: I can't select anything less then the full time between the previous two selections.
Yes, I can change this middle range to 20-22s by moving the left/right yellow edges, which was my goal in this example, but doing so causes the ranges of the one before and after to extend and thereby extending their audio adjustments of the clips over these much longer ranges. In other words it ruins the audio, I don't want to touch at all.
I think this is an oversight in the design because there doesn't appear to any way to select just part of the range between the two ranges already defined.
Put another way, if you create two ranges that don't touch, you can then only create one more range in between those two. You couldn't say create 10 ranges between the first and second ranges you created.
I'm thinking that clicking with some sort of modifier key would be the natural UI solution. For example if you click between two ranges, it selects the distance as it does today. If you command-click between two ranges, it could perhaps select create a new range between them with a duration of 3s (or some default).
Another approach to fixing this would be to command-click-move the left/right edge of the range in the middle and by doing so you it would leave the first range alone and shrink the middle range. In essence creating 4 ranges.
For reference, I'm using iMovie '11, with all updates released as of 3/20/2011 on a DualCore iMac from a few years ago. It is running the latest OS with all updates as of 3/20/2011. I'm using a Magic Mouse, just in case anyone is worried I have some strange mouse attached.