What's the easiest way to cut & select an excerpt of a song with a lot of tracks?

[Rosewood]

eg imagine I have a song that's 60 seconds long but I only want 20s-40s.  I select all & split at the two locations.  (To hopefully select & export.)

But then it gets harder: imagine it's a ton of vertical tracks so (using the mouse) you're scrolling way up and hoping to find a place to click, then you scroll all the way to the bottom and hope you don't go a little too far, or you have to restart the whole process.

I wonder if there's a way to do this with just the keyboard.

 

 

Edited February 22, 2020 by Rosewood

[Chaps]

Pressing the 's' key will split all selected tracks. Ah, I see you've already done that. Nevermind.

Edited February 22, 2020 by Chappel
Clarification

[Christian Jones]

7 hours ago, Rosewood said:

eg imagine I have a song that's 60 seconds long but I only want 20s-40s.  I select all & split at the two locations.  (To hopefully select & export.)

But then it gets harder: imagine it's a ton of vertical tracks so (using the mouse) you're scrolling way up and hoping to find a place to click, then you scroll all the way to the bottom and hope you don't go a little too far, or you have to restart the whole process.

I wonder if there's a way to do this with just the keyboard.

 

 

Do a quick bounce down of all the tracks into a single *separate* track, mute all the other tracks and cut/split what you need from the bounced track. The previous tracks won't be harmed and you can keep or discard the bounced track after you get what you want from it. 

[Chaps]

9 hours ago, Rosewood said:

eg imagine I have a song that's 60 seconds long but I only want 20s-40s.  I select all & split at the two locations.  (To hopefully select & export.)

But then it gets harder: imagine it's a ton of vertical tracks so (using the mouse) you're scrolling way up and hoping to find a place to click, then you scroll all the way to the bottom and hope you don't go a little too far, or you have to restart the whole process.

I wonder if there's a way to do this with just the keyboard.

 

 

One way to do it would be to save the project with a different name (to be safe), select all, press the 's' key where you want the first split to be. The clips to the Left of the split should be selected (unless you've changed the default split behavior) and delete them by pressing the Delete key on your keyboard. Then change the Split behavior  in Preferences so that the clips to the Right of the split are selected after splitting, then select all, split where you want your clips to end, and delete the clips to the right of the split. You'll be left with just the parts you want to keep.

From the Cakewalk for BandLab Reference File: You don't even need to save the file with a different name to edit it as long as you don't Save the project after the splitting and deleting.

To specify the default split behavior
1. Go to Edit > Preferences > Customization - Editing.
2. Under Clips, select the desired option in the Selection after single split list.

[scook]

I top and tail after export as part of a finalizing step  so don't bother about specifying the exact beginning and end before export.

If I wanted an exact export I would make a rough selection on the timeline then instead of clicking in the track view try adjusting the selection markers in the timeline or the values in the large select module. If I were going to export the same selection multiple times I might note the values in the select module and create markers based on them then use the markers as the basis for future selections.

There is no need to split clips before exporting a selection,