Audition - My delete key splits instead of deletes

[Comworld]

I'm desperate. In Audacity I can easily highlight a section of audio, hit the delete key, and it just takes out the highlighted part like it was never there, leaving the track as one track. In Audition I do the same thing and it takes out the highlighted audio and leaves me two pieces of audio with a gap in the middle. And while I'm here, I have two voices on a stereo track, left and right. I want to be able to edit those independently. There doesn't seem to be a way to do that in Audition. If there is I'd love to know how. 

Thanks!

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Doesn't do that here - if you hit the Delete key on a selection, it removes it and joins remaining audio. The Backspace key should do the same thing, FWIW.

As for editing stereo tracks independently, that's easy - but you have to remember that if you try to remove time from one track of a stereo file, it will only silence it - and that's correct. How do you do it? In Waveform view, at the end of each track on the right are two little squares marked L and R. If you click on one of these, it will grey out that channel, so any operations you carry out (with the exception of actually cutting something out of it) will apply to that channel only.

[Comworld]

Thanks, Steve. I don't want to silence it. I want to move it. I want to do an L-edit, bring one voice on top of the other. Is there a way to do that. And on the delete key, is there some shortcut setting I can change to get mine to do what yours does?

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

You have to bear in mind that Audition is a lot more flexible than Audacity is, and doesn't require to do strange things with files in Waveform view - you have way more flexibility if you do this in Multitrack, which Audacity doesn't have. Firstly split your stereo file into two mono files - Edit>Extract Channels to Mono Files. Then start a default stereo session, create two mono tracks in it and place your files on each of them. If you shove them up to the LHS to start with, they'll be sample-accurate. Now you can cut, replace, overlap, swap or repeat anything from either channel until you are happy with the result. Either export or mix down the final result and your're done. And if you save the session, you can go back and redo it if you change your mind. I'd say that compared to Audacity, that was pretty flexible...

As far as the Delete key goes, the only thing I can think of is this:

I had to create this to achieve what you appear to have as a default. You can check yours by opening the Keyboard Shortcuts (Alt+K) and using the search function, as above. Just as an experiment, I reassigned the Delete key to silence audio rather than delete it, and that's the only way I could achieve this (note the warning at the bottom). If yours doesn't look like this then I suppose that it's possible that something external has re-mapped your keyboard but that seems to be rather unlikely, I think. Anyway, have a look at how it's assigned...

[Comworld]

When I extract to mono files it makes both channels a mono file. Audacity lets you toggle between listening and editing in mono with one track and stereo with two tracks. I'll give some of the other things a try. If I sound a little frustrated it's because Catalina won't run Audacity. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Audition, but for editing spoken word simple is better. I really appreciate your help.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

"When I extract to mono files it makes both channels a mono file."

Assuming that this was a proper stereo file to start with, it makes each mono channel one side of a stereo file. If you place one on a track panned hard left and the other on a track panned hard right, then the result is the same as what you started with - stereo when you listen to it, but the files are separated so that you can work on them. I should also point out that every radio station in the world has been editing speech with Audition, or before that Cool Edit, for well over twenty years; if there was anything seriously wrong with it from the point of view of editing speech, we would have heard about it by now, believe me. Yes there is a learning curve - not denying it. But once you've worked out the best path for you (and you have quite a few options - there's more than one 'correct' way to do pretty much anything), you'll find it more productive than Audacity.

As far as Catalina goes, we know there are issues. Nice of Apple to point out in advance what they were going to be, wasn't it, even though they knew full well what was likely to happen? This is a measure of exactly how much they care about you - (I'm having trouble measuring the amount, it's so small...)

[Comworld]

Ha! I feel like I'm hooked on Apple like heroin. Is there a 12-step Mac program?

I'm going to study on everything about this stereo splitting thing. I actually work at a radio station in Nashville and nobody here can do what I need to do. In fact, production people have told me it's not possible. I may not be making it clear, but I'm recording two people at once. One goes on the left channel and the other goes on the right. I need to separate those two channels so I can slide one down so that one voice begins as the other is ending.

It looks like it would be real easy to do in the Waveform window since you can silence right or left, but all the  tools are grayed out. That doesn't make much sense to me that you can't use the tools in the waveform window. Makes me wonder what it's for.

Anyway, I don't want to take up too much of your time. I'm thinking  I may not be able to do what I need to do.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

I don't know who's telling you what, but from what you've described, all you need to do is what I said in the first place, and there's nothing you need to do that you can't do in it. If there was, we'd know about it by now! So do the extraction in Waveform view - that's all you need to do there. You'll end up with two independent mono files. You could only edit one file at a time in Waveform view anyway, so there's no way you can do your edit like that - that's what Multitrack is for.

You need to stop thinking Audacity and start thinking Audition - it's way more flexible than Audacity could ever be, as that has to work the way you describe because it has no choice - but what they do doesn't make any sense in a Multitrack environment where you have far, far more choice. Fundamentally what Audacity does is take your stereo file apart and let you reassemble it - destructively - in the same view. The difference with Audition is that you have to do the same thing in Multitrack instead, and that's non-destructive - so you can re-edit and resave as many times as you want. Makes things like versioning easier too.

The reason that Audacity is free is because ultimately, it's very limited. Believe it or not, Catalina may have actually done you a favour... 😉

[Comworld]

I'm in Waveform mode. I go to Edit>Extract Channels to Mono Files and one of the channels just goes away. And then, of course, you can't edit in Waveform mode, so I go back to Multitrack and it's exactly as it was before. A stereo file with no independent tracks.

You don't have a way to see my computer and walk me through do you?

[Kyle Hannan - Multimedia]

I agree that Audacity does things in a simpler, more instinctive and much more efficient way than trying to do the same with Audition.