Chopping

Chopping is deciding where one thing ends and another begins. rip chopper gives you four opinions about where those places are — and then lets you overrule all of them, because the tools propose and you dispose.

One timeline, four tools

All four chopping tools write to the same set of markers on the same waveform. Chop by transients, then drag two markers by hand, then apply beats to just the intro — it’s one document the whole time. Markers you’ve touched aren’t sacred to the tools, but there’s a freeze for that (below).

The tools live in a compact palette beside the preview, leaving the full-width inspector free for the active tool’s controls and descriptions:

Hits

Finds the hits — every percussive onset in the audio, ranked by strength. You choose an upper limit — 8 / 16 / 32 / All / Fill bank — and a minimum strength. The default 50% floor keeps secondary/noisy detections from padding a short loop up to the selected count, so four convincing hits produce four markers. Lower the floor when you do want quieter details. The waveform shows detected-but-unused onsets as faint ticks.

This is the default tool, and the right one most of the time: drums, rap vocals, dialogue, anything where the interesting boundaries are attacks.

Beats

Chops on the musical grid — every beat, every bar, every two bars. The app detects tempo and downbeats; when it guesses the wrong octave (it hears 184 when the song is 92), the ½x / 2x buttons fix it, and you can type a BPM or anchor bar 1 at the playhead yourself. Your correction persists with the source.

Use beats when you want even, loopable slices rather than hits — chopping a groove into bar-length loops, say.

Scenes

Chops the picture instead of the sound: scene detection finds the camera cuts. Chop a trailer by shots and every pad is a different image. This is the tool that makes video-first people gasp.

Even

Starts with an evenly spaced number of slices. From there, use Space to play, Enter to drop a cut at the playhead, and drag/Shift+click/Alt+click to move, add, or delete. Every tool’s result remains hand-editable.

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The preview: see the cut before you make it

Change a tool’s parameters and nothing happens to your markers — yet. Instead the waveform shows what Apply would do:

• cyan dashed — a new cut that would appear
• amber dashed — where an existing cut would slide (its old position dims)
• red — a cut that would disappear

You’re never surprised by a chop. When the preview looks right, press Apply; the markers become exactly what you were shown.

Use the waveform and grid icons at the right edge of the source navigator or waveform to switch between two views of those same pending chops. Video Keyboard is the default, performance-oriented view. Waveform is the structural view for placing and shaping cuts. Video Keyboard lays the pending assignments onto their destination letters for direct visual auditioning and starring. Selection, stars, playback, and the focused start editor stay synchronized when you switch.

Draft a large chop set

When a song produces more candidates than you want to organize, press Draft beside the view switcher. The chopper switches to the Video Keyboard and deals up to 26 pending chops onto a full QWERTY letter rack, with a video thumbnail in every slot and a moving preview on the focused chop. Portrait, landscape, and square sources keep their natural shape instead of being cropped. Hover, select, or hold a letter to see its translucent keyboard label centered over the video. Play the hand freely, press Enter to Keep the sparks, and Delete to Pass on the misses. Deal open pads replaces everything except keeps; passed chops stay out of the crate. Every chop is heard before an undecided one recycles, and Undo restores the previous deal.

The compact waveform beside the keyboard follows the last chop you played. Drag its start handle for a minute timing correction, or focus it and use the arrow keys for 10 ms nudges. The adjustment changes the real pending marker and joins the normal marker undo history. The first chop begins at the fixed source trim boundary, so its start is intentionally locked.

Pick a keep goal of 4, 8, 16, or the full set for a lightweight finish line—the goal encourages a shape for the hand but never stops you from finishing early.

Finishing with Use keep pile returns those choices as ordinary starred chops. Nothing is deleted automatically: adjust the stars if you like, then use the existing discard-unstarred and rerack controls when the keep pile is right.

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Scope: whole range or selection

Apply doesn’t have to touch everything. Drag on the waveform to make a selection and the tool works inside it only: chop just the drum break by transients at 16, leave your hand-cut intro alone. With a selection active, the Transients tool ranks the strongest hits within the selection — 8 hits means the 8 best in that window.

Freeze (⌘F) protects the markers in a selection from every tool until you unfreeze them. Freeze the chorus you’ve perfected, then experiment loudly everywhere else.

Guide with a stem

The selected stem changes what you hear, see in the waveform, and analyze for hits. Chops stay source-backed; after creating them, use the Stems feature to swap any clip to vocals, drums, bass, or another available stem. See Stems & analysis.

Where the slices land

The footer shows the destination — bank, group, starting pad — and expands into a pad map of the target bank so you can see exactly which pads are occupied and where the new slices will pour in. Skip-occupied is on by default: existing pads keep their clips and new slices flow around them.

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Re-chopping

Any clip can go back in the chopper. That loop you rendered from a jam session? Chop it into eight pieces. Chopping is not a stage of the pipeline — it’s a move you can make at any time, on anything.