Ardour's editor utilizes a grid to assist in the placement of regions on the timeline, or with editing functions that need to happen at a specific point in time. You can choose if you want the cursor and various objects to snap to this grid, and how you want the snapping to behave. You can modify the grid units to fit your needs.
There are two ways to think about aligning material to a grid. The first and most obvious one is where an object's position is clamped to grid lines. In Ardour, this is called absolute snap and is commonly used when working with sampled material where audio begins exactly at the beginning of a file, note or region. The second, relative snap, is used when an object's position relative to the grid lines is important. In music, this allows you to move objects around without changing the "feel" (or timing) of a performance. Absolute snap is the default method of snapping in Ardour. While dragging objects you may switch from absolute to relative snap by pressing the absolute snap modifier key(s). You may also disable snap entirely by using the snap modifier (see below). Note that in relative snap mode the reference point is taken to be the distance to the nearest grid line. Note also that when an object lies exactly on a grid line, there will be no difference between relative and absolute snap modes. The realtive snap and snap modifiers (along with other modifier keys) may be set in Edit > Preferences > User Interaction For common use patterns, it is recommended that you assign a unique key for one snap modifier and two keys for the other in such a way that they share an otherwise unused key. For example, you may choose the snap modifier to be the key and the relative snap modifier to be the and keys.
.Using the above modifications, Ardour supports three different modes of snapping to the grid:
By default, a region's beginning will be used as the reference for both types of snapping, but you can change this behaviour by setting a sync point in the region. Select the region(s) and press V. This will set the sync point to your edit point.
The selector next to the grid mode selector defines the size of the grid elements. You can set your grid to several different units:
To use Region starts/ends/syncs/bounds as snap choices, you must have either
If you are moving items on a track, and only the current track is selected, then you will only be able to snap to other regions on the same track. This means that enabling Edit > Preferences > Editor > Link Selections of Regions and Tracks will make the "Region" grid unit unusable. Avoid the use of this option if you are going to use any of the Region grid units.