Steinberg Cubase Essential 4 Operation Manual

151
The Sample Editor
Window overview
The Elements menu
If you right-click in the Sample Editor to bring up the 
Quick menu, you will find a submenu called “Elements”. 
By activating or deactivating options on this submenu, you 
specify what is shown in the editor window. Some of 
these options are also available as icons on the toolbar.
The toolbar
The toolbar contains the tools…
… and information about the edited audio clip:
The Sample Editor tools Audition, Loop & 
Volume controlsAutoscroll
Show...

152
The Sample Editor
Initially, length and position values are displayed in the for-
mat specified in the Project Setup dialog. If you click in the 
middle field, a pop-up menu opens, where you can select 
another display format. This selection affects the Sample 
Editor ruler as well.
You can customize the toolbar by right-clicking it and 
using the pop-up menu to hide or show items.
Selecting Setup from the pop-up menu allows you to 
reorder sections on the toolbar, store presets, etc. See 
“The Setup...

153
The Sample Editor
The Hitpoints tab
In this tab, the transients, i.e. hitpoints of the audio can be 
marked. 
Adjust the sensitivity slider to determine how many hit-
points should be shown, and edit them with the Edit Hit-
points tool, if necessary. If you want to clear all hitpoints, 
e.g. to re-detect hitpoints, click the Remove All button.
Click the Slice & Close button, if you want to slice your 
audio to quantize the rhythm of the different slices sepa-
rately (see “Creating slices” on page...

154
The Sample Editor
When the level scale is shown, you can select whether 
the level should be shown as a percentage or in dB.
This is done by right-clicking the level scale and selecting an option from 
the pop-up menu that appears. This also allows you to hide the level scale.
To display the level scale after hiding it, right-click to 
bring up the Quick menu and activate “Level Scale” on the 
Elements submenu.
This submenu also allows you to select whether you 
want the zero axis and/or the half...

155
The Sample Editor
By using key commands
If you activate the “Playback Toggle triggers Local Pre-
view” option in the Preferences (Transport page), you can 
use the [Space] bar to audition. This is the same as click-
ing the Audition icon on the toolbar.
By using the Audition icon
Clicking the Audition icon on the toolbar plays back the 
edited audio, according to the following rules:
 If you have made a selection, this selection will be played 
back.
 If there is no selection, but the option “Show...

156
The Sample Editor
You can also adjust the snap point by setting the project 
cursor:
1.Place the cursor at the desired position (intersecting 
the event).
You may want to do this by scrubbing, to spot the right position exactly.
2.Right-click to open the Quick menu and select “Snap 
Point To Cursor” from the Audio submenu.
The snap point will be set to the position of the cursor. This method can 
also be used in the Project window and the Audio Part Editor.
It is also possible to define a snap point...

157
The Sample Editor
Cut, Copy and Paste
The Cut, Copy and Paste commands (on the Edit menu in 
the Sample Editor context menu or in the main Edit menu) 
work according to the following rules:
Selecting Copy copies the selection to the clipboard.
Selecting Cut removes the selection from the clip and 
moves it to the clipboard.
The section to the right of the selection is moved to the left to fill out the 
gap.
Selecting Paste copies the data on the clipboard into 
the clip.
If there is a selection in...

158
The Sample Editor
Options and settings
Show audio event
When the Show Audio Event button is activated on the 
toolbar (or the option “Audio Event” is activated on the Ele-
ments submenu on the Quick menu), the section corre-
sponding to the edited event is highlighted in the waveform 
display and Thumbnail. The sections of the audio clip not 
belonging to the event are shown with a dark gray back-
ground.
In this mode, you can adjust the start and end of the 
event in the clip by dragging the event...

159
The Sample Editor
2.Open the Playback tab in the Sample Editor Inspector 
and activate the Straighten Up mode.
Your loop will automatically adapt to the project tempo. 
If you want to use an audio file instead, or if the beat of 
your loop is not straight, further adjustments could be 
necessary. These are described in the following sections.
About the Straighten Up mode
The Straighten Up mode is one of the key audio warp fea-
tures. It allows you to lock audio clips to the project tempo 
by using...

160
The Sample Editor
Working with hitpoints and slices
Hitpoint detection is a special feature of the Sample Edi-
tor. It detects attack transients in an audio file and then 
adds a type of marker, a “hitpoint”, at each transient. 
These hitpoints allow you to create “slices”, where each 
slice ideally represents each individual sound or “beat” in 
a loop (drum or other rhythmic loops work best with this 
feature). When you have successfully sliced the audio file, 
you can do a number of useful things...