Insert Silence in a batch in Audition

Report · Apr 30, 2020

Hi, I wanted to insert silences to multiple places in a monologue. What am I doing now is I listen to the monologue first and insert markers (press M) in the audio first. I created the shortcut Q for insert silence. What I am trying to do is to use Alt+arrow to navigate to the markers and press Q to insert silences. but it doesn't work. Any idea how can I insert silences at markers in a batch. (Assuming I just would like to add a 3 seconds silence at each marker, just a pause).

Appreciate.

Report · Apr 30, 2020

I'm afraid that there are a number of shortcomings in anything to do with scripting in of Audition - the previous version (even though it was undocumented) actually worked better. But you have to go back to Audition 3 for that, and all of the useful scripts we had for that are effectively useless. As for applying an effect at a marker point in a batch - well I wish! No, not a chance I'm afraid.

But since you are having to go through this manually, setting a shortcut to Insert Silence should work fine. I tried it with A and there were no problems, and navigating to the markers works fine too. The only downside is that even though the silence insert remembers the last time you used each time, you still have to click on 'okay' to get it to carry it out.

You might have thought that you could perhaps set this up as a favorite, and you certainly can set one up - but what you can't do (which is utterly ridiculous) is set it to do what you want, at the point you've positioned the cursor - so at a random point in a file. The option 'at cursor point' simply isn't there! This single missing option renders a lot of the Favorites useless.

So while the sort of things you want to do seem perfecly reasonable, I'm afraid that at present they simply aren't possible, I'm afraid. Hacks me off too...

Report · Apr 30, 2020

Appreciate Steve.

Yes, I tried to record a silence in favorite, but it pops up "a new favorite could not be created because no supported actions were recorded". It's really frustrating.

Also I tried copy a silence first and then navigate to markers by Alt+arrow to paste the silence. The weired is it works for the first marker I went to, but no luck from the 2nd marker.

I tried to insert silences to the markers. I can navigate to the markers by Alt+arrow, but the same as the copy paste, it works for the 1st marker, but no luck for the 2nd marker by hitting the shortcut, eventhough the window asking for confirming the silence during still comes up. It just flashed but no silence added. You said it worked on your end. did you try add silences to multiple markers by hitting shortcut, or even from Edit insert silence?

Thank you very much!

Report · May 01, 2020

The only way to record a silence in a favorite is to record Edit>Insert>Silence as a step, and when you get the setup option, put three seconds in there, or whatever you want. The trouble starts after that though - there's no way you can just position the cursor where you want it and have it work. It's either Relative To or Absolute. Absolute is obviously useless, and the one thing missing from Relative is a 'at cursor point' option. All you get is stupid percentages which, quite frankly, are no help to man nor beast. The problem is that you can make this system work for a selection, but not a cursor position, and that's what needs to be rectified (I'm working on it... suggestions are being made shortly)

The copy and paste method should work fine though - it certainly does here. Create three seconds of silence, highlight and copy it (I tend to use clipboard two for this, but you don't have to). Now, wherever you put the cursor, all you have to do is hit Ctrl+V and the three seconds of silence gets pasted.

But the 'Insert Silence' with a shortcut should work fine - if I get a chance I'll post a video screengrab of it later.

Report · Aug 20, 2022

I just went through this...

Your file may not be in a supported format, for example .m4a (Produced by Camtasia). Convert the file to a supported format like .wav

Report · Aug 21, 2022

You can't open any file in Audition that isn't already a Wav file without it being automatically decoded to Wav - that's the only format supported. So that can't have anything to do with it, I'm afraid.