TorS,

...that's what I thought at first and disabled all the "snap to's" on the menu...still have the problem...

...another thing about this problem...when I click the mouse in the file, it's always selecting the whole clip...

First use the expand track size button in the track header area. Next sit on your up arrow key on your keyboard until you zoom in enough. Trust me, you can zoom in so far that a couple frames fills your screen.

As far as selecting smaller parts of the file use the split function to break the track into smaller pieces.

Lets says you want to work on a 5 second area. Split at the start and end of that time range. You now have three events. Right click on the left of the three events. From switches select lock which will prevent any thing from moving. It will gray out the track.

Next do your thing on the middle event. When you're zoomed way in grabbing the right edge of the event by placing your cursor over the right edge will contract or expand the event in very tiny steps. You can also use split again. Place cursor where you want to cut. click on with your mouse a new event is formed. Right click, select delete or cut and parts of the event you no longer want are trimmed out. To close the gap, right click on the right event (what was the second half of your event when you started)select all events to end and you can drag left to rejoin the other events taking out empty space or drag in further right to make more room for further editing.

Or... use the trimmer.

At a quick look, the smallest step i could jump was one frame, which (in PAL land) is one 25th second. To do that you must have time & frames or absolute frames selected for the timeline. Do you need finer adjustments than that?
Tor

BillyBoy...

...I understand.....I know it's basically a video program but a freehand mouse selection of any size, anywhere woulda been nice like they have in a zillion other sound editors...just wanted to make sure I wasn't doing anything wrong...looks like I can't toss my audio editor yet...thanks for your time...

TorS

...the problem seems that I"m restricted to whatever the scale is ...it appears this is a Vegas 'feature' from BillyBoy's answer...thanks for your time....I'll have to stick to my external editor...no problemo...

There's a "Quantize to Frames" button on the toolbar that looks like a little filmstrip with a clock face. If that's set, you're limited to frame boundaries, but with it turned off you should be able to edit on .001 second boundaries.

You can also change the timeline scale to seconds by right-clicking where the timeline frame numbers appear.

If the problem you're experiencing is that you can't work at finer resolution than one video frame then just deselect the "Quantize to Frames" item on the Options menu. This will allow you to work down to audio sample resolution.

As a general rule, you want "Quantize to Frames" on when you are working with video and off when you are working with audio.

Mark