3.11. Copy and Paste

Let's face it: Copy and paste form the cornerstone of the personal-computer religion. If you couldn't copy and paste, where would word processing be? Where would Photoshop be? Where would college students be?

It works with regions just as it does with fields in FileMaker, objects in a drawing program, or icons in the Finder:

1. Select the region or regions you want to copy .

   Click to select the first one, Shift-click to select additional regions, either in the same track or in other tracks. Or just "drag out" a huge selection rectangle, as shown in Figure 3-1.

2. Press -C (or choose Edit Copy) .

   You've just placed a copy of the selected music on your invisible Macintosh Clipboard; the original regions remain where they are. If you press -X (or choose Edit Cut) instead you place a copy on the Clipboard and remove the selected regions from the piece.

3. Click in the beat ruler to indicate where you want the Clipboard regions to reappear .

   Or move the Playhead to the proper spot using the arrow keys, the time display, or any other navigation technique.

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   Note: If your aim is to paste the music at the very end of the piece, you may find that you're not allowed to move the Playhead beyond the end of the existing music. The trick is to first drag the end-of-song marker farther to the right. (It's the tiny, dark purple, left-pointing triangle in the beat ruler.)

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4. Press -V (or choose Edit Paste) .

   The cut or copied music appears at the position of the Playhead.

The regions always reappear in the tracks from which you cut or copied them; you can't paste into a different track.