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. This snapping of the cursor and various objects to the grid can be toggled on or off, as does its behaviour, and grid units.
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 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, pressing the absolute snap modifier key(s) switches from absolute to relative snap.
The snap can also be entirely disabled 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 to 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, the snap modifier may be chosen 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, this behaviour can be changed by setting a sync point in the region, by selecting the region(s) and pressing V. This will set the sync point to the current edit point.
The selector next to the grid mode selector defines the size of the grid elements. The grid can be set to several different units:
To use Region starts/ends/syncs/bounds as snap choices, it is necessary to have either:
If items are moved on a track, and only the current track is selected, then snapping will only happen with 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. This option should not be used in conjunction with the use any of the Region grid units.