More Audio Convenience: Setting Pan With Shortcuts

Every audio clip can be easily adjusted for pan with keyboard shortcuts. You can do this either when the clip is on the timeline or when it is open in the View. This sure beats fussing with that pan slider in the viewer, so these are definitely some valuable shortcuts to add to your repertoire.

When you adjust “pan,” you are determining, for a single channel of audio, how much of the sound comes out of each speaker. If you have a “stereo” recording consisting of two tracks, each one might panned all the way to the left or right speaker or they may have some overlap. Most often, I find myself needing to pan one, or usually a bunch of clips to the center (maybe I only want a center-panned mono track for SFX). The shortcut for panning a slected clip or clips to center is:

Of course there are shortcuts for “pan left” and “pan right” as well. Pan Left is CTRL , (comma)

and Pan Right is CTRL / (slash)

By the way, if you are already on the CTRL ,./ program, you should make sure you’re also using CTRL - and + or [ and ] to adjust audio levels on the timeline as that’s an even greater timesaver!

This shortcut is an update from one previously discussed on 3/17/2010.