This section explains the rules used to decide which regions are affected by editing operations. You don't really have to understand them — hopefully things will Just Work — but it may be useful eventually to understand the rules.

Editing operations in Ardour either operate on a single point in time (Split being the obvious example) or on two points (which can also be considered to be a range of sorts), Separate is a good example of this.

Most operations will operate on the currently selected region(s), but if no regions are selected, the region that the mouse is in will be used instead. Single-point operations will generally pick a set of regions to use based on the following rules:

• If the edit point is `mouse', then
  • if the mouse is over a selected region, or no region, use all selected regions, or
  • if the mouse is over an unselected region, use just that region.
• For all other edit points
  • use the selected regions and those that are both under the edit position and on a selected track, or on a track which is in the same active edit-enabled route group as a selected region.

The rationale here for the two different rules is that the mouse edit point is special in that its position indicates both a time and a track; the other edit points (Playhead,Marker) indicate a time only.