Vertical guides when moving or resizing the loop area

[giacecco]

What problem(s) would this feature resolve?

See the picture below. While mixing, imagine I need to loop exactly the area highlighted in red because I need to get the volume of those gang voices saying “hey!” right.

Of course, I want to define the loop area to be strictly around that, and repeat playing those few seconds - and just those few seconds - as many times as necessary.

However, the way Bitwig behaves (using 5.3.8 at the moment), setting an exact loop area is difficult, particularly on large displays, because - when moving or resizing the loop area, no vertical guides are shown highlighting its boundaries.

It would be amazing instead if those boundaries showed up temporarily, like in the mock-up below, just when changing the loop area, and then disappeared.

Also, Bitwig does not allow you to scroll down further than the last track, so I cannot make so that the bottom tracks get to the top and close to the beat ruler. The points I want to address always remain far from the beat ruler where I can set the loop.

How does this feature fit in Bitwig as a product?

It would improve its suitability to mixing and mastering engineers.

Is there already an alternative way to achieve this on Bitwig?

No.

Could it be implemented using Bitwig components or APIs, without Bitwig team’s support?

No.

Could it be provided by a VST or something else reasonably integrated with Bitwig?

No.

Are there other products that offer this feature?

Logic Pro exactly the vertical guides I am missing.

[x.iso]

you can do the time select on region you want and Ctrl+L (might be different on mac) for looping that time selection, you can also see that option when opening context menu on time selection.
Additionally, if you hold Shift while doing time selection, then it’s not snapping to current tempo grid if snap is enabled, if it’s disabled then it works the other way around.

[giacecco]

Thanks @x.iso , I know how to set a loop area What I’m missing is the vertical guides to show and help changing it precisely. On large screens, there can be a lot of physical distance between the beat ruler at the top and the audio bit I may be aiming at at the bottom of the screen.

Btw, Studio shows a vertical ruler when simply pointing at a different point in the project, but the same vertical ruler is not visible when changing a loop area. That’s just silly and inconsistent, there’s no reason not to do it.

[x.iso]

the time selection has pretty clear vertical guides, but they’re vertically limited to tracks you select. you can though drag across multiple tracks to make those taller

[giacecco]

Ha, I’ve finally understood what you mean.

Instead of changing the loop marker in the beat ruler - that is what I would find natural to do - the “expected behaviour” of the user is to instead highlight the target area of a track, then right-click and choose “Loop selected region” or Command-L.

That is convenient, yes, but I still believe that showing guides when changing the loop marker’s boundaries would be obvious to do, too.