Right mouse button lasso select

[Starship Krupa]

I'm posting this because when I came to Cakewalk from using other DAW's, it took me some time to figure this out, and it's not as obvious as it might be.*

If you want to lasso select multiple elements on the screen, such as clips in Track View and notes in Piano Roll, rather than switching to the Select Tool, hold your right mouse button and drag. This feels odd at first because we're so used to clicking and holding with the left button to drag select in other programs, but things sometimes work a bit differently in Cakewalk, which predates many programs that we grew up with. Also, I thought that the Select Tool was the only way to....select things.

So I had been using the Select Tool (which has its limitations, and it's at least a couple of keystrokes to change tools back and forth) or relying on the Smart Tool (which too often gave unexpected results). Once I figured this one out, it made things go a lot quicker!

*(If you think this is the most basic thing to be ignorant of, I didn't have the benefit of the Reference Guide!)

[Jim Fogle]

Hey @Starship Krupa, Steve Cook posted a response to an interesting Smart Tool question.  You may find Steve's answer relevant to the way you work.  Link to Smart Tool thread

Hint:  Did you know you can customize the Smart Tool?

[Starship Krupa]

3 hours ago, Jim Fogle said:

Did you know you can customize the Smart Tool?

Oh yes, it was a great and happy day for me when that first release came out that would allow turning off the comp function of the Smart Tool.

Since I didn't yet understand Cakewalk's Speed Comping (those were the days before the Reference Guide came out), I was, over and over, selecting bits of clips and having the Smart Tool assume that my selection boundaries were Speed Comping cuts. When trying to do this with clips that were Grouped, especially, I made some miserable messes. I just couldn't understand why selecting a region would make these automatic cuts (the answer is: I was in Speed Comping mode without knowing it).

I did finally twig that switching to the Select and Edit Tools was the way to go for the style of comping I was trying do, and now I can have the Smart Tool enabled without injuring myself. I still do switch to the Edit Tool sometimes for slip editing.