Waveform View

The Waveform section has many functions. The most basic one is clicking on it to move the playhead around.
If you Click-Drag and wipe a purple range across it and release the mouse button it will select/zoom the waveform.

Then you can grab this section with the DnD Bar and drag it to your DAW or use any other function in BaseHead like Spot to Track using (S)

You can un-zoom one level of zoom by pressing (Z) or zoom all the way out by pressing (A)

If you hold SHIFT and click and wipe it will not zoom in but instead will create a temporary Yellow Range like the below image.

When this yellow range is visible you can can either drag it out of BH by clicking in the top part of the WF between the yellow markers and drag.

OR you can do Destructive Editing and delete it by pressing (DEL) or (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+T) to trim the audio file when the yellow range is shown.

TimeCode Support

As of v2022.5 files that contain a timecode stamp have the option to display timecode information in the timeline.

When you select a file that has a value in the Timecode metadata field the TC button will appear next to the time display. You can then toggle this On/Off to switch between the TC time or the file length time. The TC button will only appear when a valid non zero TC value is detected

Markers

There are 4 different types of settable markers that can be used in BaseHead.

The differences are:

These are orange markers with ‘Start’ and ‘End’ labels on them.
When these are visible and turned ON the playhead will skip over audio that is low in volume getting to what you want to hear faster.

These can be turned ON/OFF from the Waveform Settings menu (gear icon) located at the top right of the WF.

These are Markers that are stored in the CUE Chunk within the sound file and BaseHead supports reading/writing these markers which are often written by other software.

For more info see the following help page Marker Panel 

These are yellow and are for Nuendo/Cubase and ProTools users only.(ProTools supported added in version 5.2). You can set them and they will transfer to these DAW’s.

They can be set by holding ALT (PC) or Cmd (Mac) and clicking on the WaveForm. They can be removed by also ALT+Clicking them.
(NOTE: This information is written permanently into the file’s iXML chunk)

Example Use: set a SyncPoint at a peak of a car by so the next time you drag that car by out of BH the video will be synced to the the peak of the car by and soon as it hits the Nuendo timeline. ProTools users can take advantage of this feature also now, using the “S” command, but Nuendo/Cubase users can also use this feature via Drag and Drop.

Holding Shift and clicking on the waveform will create a temporary green Trigger Marker that can be used to re-trigger the file from over and over.
This will be part of a much larger future feature to be announced soon.

NOTE: You can click and drag these markers to move them around (besides skip silence). To remove one just hold ALT and click on the Triangle at the top of the marker.

Waveform Actions

If you right click the Waveform or click the small gear icon in the top right of the waveform display you get a whole set of Actions and Options that can be done:

Rebuild Waveform (F5)
As you select files the waveform view needs to be generated and is stored to display files faster the next time you select them. Using this option you can force the waveform to be regenerated if it was incorrectly drawn or if a file change hasn’t triggered a WF update.

Build All Waveforms
This feature will scan through all the files currently shown in the results list and generate the waveform files allowing you to browse through your files a bit faster. This process can take a while, so it’s best to do it over night if you have a big library…..8)
Make sure you set your ‘Max records returned’ on the Options page to ALL so all records get displayed for walking.

(Note: The waveform files are stored in a folder named _wfCache next to the files unless you choose a local drive to cache to)

Add Marker/Region (M)
Sets a CUE Marker OR if a Yellow Range is selected a CUE Region. Be sure to click the WRITE button on the Markers tab to store your marker in your file or select the “Auto-Write” option on the Markers tab to make sure markers are automatically stored in your file.

Remove Playback Region (Ctrl/Cmd+M)
Removes old style aXML Markers from the file

Sum to Mono (Shift+M)
Sums Channels to Mono to allow export as a mono audio file.

Reverse File (Ctrl/Cmd+R)
Physically reverses the current file and creates a temp file to play with. The waveform will turn purple indicating this:

Delete Selected Region (DEL)
Destructively removes region that is selected with the YELLOW region when holding the SHIFT key

Trim File Destructively (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+T)
Destructively removes the head and tail around the selected YELLOW region

NOTE: For all destructive actions you must hold shift and wipe a yellow range first across the Waveform.

Save Edited File (Ctrl/Cmd+S)
Overwrites the original file with the newly edited one Destructively!
This can’t be undone!!

Waveform Options

Right-click the waveform or click the gear icon to set the available options. Most options are on/off type options:

Disable Waveform Zoom
When checked ON prevents BH from zooming on mouse button up and instead places temp yellow region marker brackets instead. This is most useful when working with markers to allow fast adding of markers without triggering zoom.

Hide Markers
Hides the markers that have been set. You will still see the markers listed in the marker panel but these will appear dimmed and will not show or trigger in the waveform.

Use Waveform Caching
When checked ON, a waveform overview .wf file will be written to the hard drive in a sub folder of the selected file directory named _wfCache

Cached waveforms will load way faster then drawing each time for long files so it’s highly suggested to leave this setting ON.
We recommend building waveforms for all your files to make BH run faster when you get some free time.

Cache Locally
When checked ON, it creates the waveform caches on the drive of your choice instead of writing them to a sub-directory of where the files are located. This is helpful and most used for when file are on slow network servers OR when a network SFX server’s write access is disabled.
For PC you can choose the location by drive drive letter.
For Mac they are created in ~/ApplicationSupport/BaseHead/_localWFCache on your system drive.

Auto Gain Waveform
When ON will Normalize the WF visually so it always looks healthy. This simply adjusts the WF display and does not affect the actual sound of the file.

Higher Resolution Drawing
When ON double the pointCount is used.

Skip Silence
When checked ON the playhead will jump to the first part of a file where sound is found and skip over dead air. You will see a Start/End marker when silence has been detected. This is not stored in the file but detected by BaseHead when generating the WF overview.

[Video] Waveform Overview

Video covers all the details above for the Waveform View