ST4 1810 - Audio Regions | Grab handles always trigger audio playback

AnthonyB

I've not been a big user of Audio Regions in the past so not sure if this is intended behaviour or not, but I assume it is.

Environment: ST4 Build 1810, iPad iOS 26.0.1

Current Behaviour
When I touch and drag on the grab handle on the edge of a Region to move the boundary, it always triggers audio playback.

Now, I can imagine that if you are zoomed in and moving a region boundary back and forth, this might be desirable (similar to old school tape editing and manually rocking & rolling the tape back and forth) as you are looking to get it on an exact spot in the song (all you loopers - I'm looking at you 🙂 )

I think I may be part of a growing set of users that will adopt Audio Regions but simply use it as visual cues for song structure (especially now that ST4 supports pushing this to Client devices in Network Sessions) and maybe for song navigation at a rehersal when you just want to jump to a certain part of the song quickly.

In that scenario, the boundary doesn't have to be exactly in the right spot, because we're not relying on clean audio loops and cuts in a live performance.

The workflow I've made up is to just play the track from start to finish, and hit the + button at the start of each region. This results in a song with a bunch a default length regions on it.
Because I've created a region at each, section of the song, to fix up the region lengths all I need to do is drag the end of each region up to the start of the next one. Then I go in and edit region Name and Colour.

So, when pulling the region boundary grab bars around, I don't need to hear any audio. More than that, the UI seems to get noticably sluggish as you are moving boundaries and the audio engine is cueing and playing audio (might be worse when using multitrack audio), making it harder to just move a boundary.

Desired Behaviour
Could we add a Mute Audio button under the waveform on the button bar where the existing zoom, region length lock, Play, Playhead Follow and Beatgrid buttons are located?
This would stop the audio engine from being engaged (also disable Play button to reinforce?) and keep the UI snappy when you are editing audio regions but don't need to hear the audio.

This should also ensure that no-one loses any existing functionality.

peter

Yes, that's intentional so that you hear a preview while dragging. Helps to find the beat.

Vedeja

I create my audio regions by means of markers in Logic Pro, so manually defining regions in ST was something I never really used. But I can see how it may be both helpful and annoying to have an audio preview.